Aerial search for missing jet ends, undersea hunt expands
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THE aerial search for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet was called off yesterday, and the underwater hunt will be expanded to include a vast swath of ocean floor that may take at least eight months to thoroughly search, Australian officials said.
Not a single piece of confirmed debris from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has been recovered by a massive multinational hunt that began after it disappeared March 8 with 239 people on board.
“It is highly unlikely at this stage that we will find any aircraft debris on the ocean surface. By this stage, 52 days into the search, most material would have become waterlogged and sunk,” Prime Minister Tony Abbott said.
“Therefore, we are moving from the current phase to a phase which is focused on searching the ocean floor over a much larger area,” he said.
The US Navy’s Bluefin 21 robotic submarine has spent weeks scouring the initial search area for the plane in the remote Indian Ocean far off Australia’s west coast, but has found no trace of the missing aircraft. Officials are now looking to bring in new equipment that can search a larger patch of seabed, Abbott said.
The aerial search officially ended yesterday, the search coordination center confirmed.
Radar and satellite data show the jet veered far off course for unknown reasons during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing.
The unmanned sub has been creating a sonar map of the ocean floor for more than two weeks near where signals consistent with airplane black boxes were heard on April 8. The sub has searched a 400-square kilometer area.
Crews will now begin searching the plane’s entire probable impact zone, an area 700 kilometers long and 80 kilometers wide, Abbott said.
That will be a monumental task — and one that will take time, warned Angus Houston, head of the search effort. “If everything goes perfectly ... we’ll be doing well if we do it in eight months,” Houston said.
Officials will contact private companies to bring in additional equipment, Abbott said.
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