MH370: Plan For Search To Restart On Sunday After Four Months On Hold After a four-month hiatus, the hunt for Malaysia Airlines flight 370 is about to resume in a desolate stretch of the southern Indian Ocean, with searchers lowering new equipment deep hoping to finally solve one of the world’s most perplexing aviation mysteries. The GO Phoenix, the first of three ships that will spend up to a year hunting for the wreckage far off Australia’s west coast, is expected to arrive in the search zone on Sunday, although weather could delay its progress. Crews will use sonar, video cameras and jet fuel sensors to scour the water for any trace of the Boeing 777, which disappeared on 8 March during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. The search has been on hold for months so crews could map the seabed in the search zone, about 1,800km off Western Australia. The 60,000 sq km search area lies along what is known as the “seventh arc”, a stretch of ocean where investigators believe the plane ran out of fuel and crashed. The belief is based largely on an analysis of transmissions between the plane and a satellite. Given that there have been false alarms, from underwater signals wrongly thought to be from the plane’s black boxes to possible debris fields that turned out to be rubbish, officials say their are “cautiously optimistic” rather than confident. “We’re cautiously optimistic; cautious because of all the technical and other challenges we’ve got, but optimistic because we’re confident in the analysis,” said Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, the agency leading the search. “But it’s just a very big area that we’re looking at.” That area was largely unknown to scientists before the mapping process began in May. Two ships have surveyed the seabed using multibeam sonar devices, similar to a fish-finder. The equipment sends out a series of signals that determine the shape and hardness of the terrain below, allowing officials to create three-dimensional maps of the seabed. Those maps are considered crucial because the seafloor is riddled with deep crevasses, mountains and volcanoes, which could prove disastrous to the pricey, delicate search equipment that will be towed just 100m above the seabed. Two of the search ships will use underwater search vessels worth about $1.5m each. “You can imagine if you’re towing a device close to the seafloor, you want to know if you’re about to run into a mountain,” said Stuart Minchin, chief of the environmental geoscience division at Geoscience Australia, which has been analysing the mapping data.
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 08:02:59 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015