Search teams use ‘best guess’
Print Edition
THE search for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet entered a new stage yesterday when navy ships deployed stingray-shaped sound locators in a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean, in an urgent hunt for the plane’s data recorders before they fall silent.
Officials leading the search for flight MH370 said there was no specific information that led to the underwater devices being used for the first time, but that they were brought into the effort because there was nothing to lose. An arduous weeks-long hunt has failed to turn up any wreckage that could have led searchers to the plane and eventually to its black boxes, which contain key information about the flight.
Beacons in the black boxes emit “pings” so they can be more easily found. The beacons’ batteries last about a month.
“No hard evidence has been found to date, so we have made the decision to search a sub-surface area on which the analysis has predicted MH370 is likely to have flown,” said Commander Peter Leahy, head of military forces involved in the search.
Two ships with equipment that can hear the “pings” yesterday made their way along a 240-kilometer route investigators hope may be close to where the flight entered the water after it vanished on March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The head of the joint agency coordinating the search acknowledged the search area was essentially a best guess — and said time is running out to find the data recorders.
“The locator beacon will last about a month before it ceases its transmissions, so we’re getting pretty close to the time when it might expire,” Angus Houston said.
The Australian navy ship Ocean Shield towed a pinger locator from the US Navy and the British navy’s HMS Echo, equipped with similar gear, looked for the black boxes in an area agreed on after analyzing satellite pings the aircraft gave off after it disappeared.
That information, combined with data on the estimated speed and performance of the aircraft, led them to that specific stretch, Houston said.
As the US Navy’s pinger locator can pick up black box signals to a depth of 6,100 meters, it should be able to hear the data recorders even if they are lying in the deepest part of the search zone. But that’s only if the locator gets within range of them, a tough task, given the size of the search area and the fact that the pinger locator must be dragged slowly through the water at just 1 to 5 knots.
Finding floating wreckage is key, as data on ocean currents can then be used to backtrack to the spot where the plane hit the water, and where the black boxes might be. They would provide data about what condition the plane was flying under and any communications in the cockpit.
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