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The submarine drone Bluefin 21 has so far searched about 95 percent of a 10 square km (6.2 square mile) area of the Indian Ocean seabed, pinpointed after the detection of acoustic pings believed to be from the plane's black box flight recorders. Bluefin 21 had to abort the search on Friday and resurface due to a software malfunction. Technicians fixed the drone overnight and its 14th, 16 hour trip to the sea floor at depths of more than 4.5 km (2.8 miles) was underway on Saturday. "If no contacts of interest are made, Bluefin-21 will continue to examine the areas adjacent to the 10km radius," Australia's Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) in charge of the search said in a statement.
Flight MH370 disappeared without a trace on March 8 flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. The search for MH370 is the longest and most expensive in aviation history, with ships and aircraft from some two dozen nations taking part. The air and sea search continued on Saturday with up to 8 military aircraft and 11 ships. A U.S. defense official told Reuters on Friday that the sea search is likely to drag on for years as it enters the much more difficult phase of scouring broader areas of the ocean near where the plane is believed to have crashed.
The Phoenix International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Artemis, also known as the Bluefin-21, is prepared for deployment from the Australian Defence Vessel Ocean Shield in the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in the Southern Indian Ocean in this undated picture released on April 21, 2014 by the Australian Defence Force.
Speaking under condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the search effort, the official said Malaysia would have to decide how to proceed with the search, including whether to bring in more underwater drones. The Australian and Malaysian governments are under pressure to show what lengths they are prepared to go to in order to give closure to the grieving families of those on board flight MH370. Malaysia is also under growing pressure to improve its disclosure about its investigation. Prime Minister Najib Razak told CNN on Thursday his government would make public a preliminary report into the plane's disappearance next week.
Indian Ocean undersea hunt for MH370 set to be extended | Reuters
Authorities decide to extend search...
Indian Ocean undersea hunt for MH370 set to be extended
Sat Apr 26, 2014 - The undersea search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is to be extended beyond the small area identified as its most likely resting place as the quest for any sign of the missing plane enters its 50th day on Saturday.
The submarine drone Bluefin 21 has so far searched about 95 percent of a 10 square km (6.2 square mile) area of the Indian Ocean seabed, pinpointed after the detection of acoustic pings believed to be from the plane's black box flight recorders. Bluefin 21 had to abort the search on Friday and resurface due to a software malfunction. Technicians fixed the drone overnight and its 14th, 16 hour trip to the sea floor at depths of more than 4.5 km (2.8 miles) was underway on Saturday. "If no contacts of interest are made, Bluefin-21 will continue to examine the areas adjacent to the 10km radius," Australia's Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) in charge of the search said in a statement.
Flight MH370 disappeared without a trace on March 8 flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. The search for MH370 is the longest and most expensive in aviation history, with ships and aircraft from some two dozen nations taking part. The air and sea search continued on Saturday with up to 8 military aircraft and 11 ships. A U.S. defense official told Reuters on Friday that the sea search is likely to drag on for years as it enters the much more difficult phase of scouring broader areas of the ocean near where the plane is believed to have crashed.
The Phoenix International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Artemis, also known as the Bluefin-21, is prepared for deployment from the Australian Defence Vessel Ocean Shield in the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in the Southern Indian Ocean in this undated picture released on April 21, 2014 by the Australian Defence Force.
Speaking under condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the search effort, the official said Malaysia would have to decide how to proceed with the search, including whether to bring in more underwater drones. The Australian and Malaysian governments are under pressure to show what lengths they are prepared to go to in order to give closure to the grieving families of those on board flight MH370. Malaysia is also under growing pressure to improve its disclosure about its investigation. Prime Minister Najib Razak told CNN on Thursday his government would make public a preliminary report into the plane's disappearance next week.
Indian Ocean undersea hunt for MH370 set to be extended | Reuters
Some families of the lost plane's 239 passengers and crew were angry over the decision to stop what is already the most expensive search in aviation history, having cost $135 million. Others continued to hold out hope. "In the absence of new evidence, Malaysia, Australia and China have collectively decided to suspend the search upon completion of the 46,300-square-mile search area," Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said after a meeting with his Australian and Chinese counterparts. There are fewer than 3,900 square miles left to be searched. In a statement read by Liow, the ministers acknowledged that "the likelihood of finding the aircraft is fading."
The ministers said the search could be revived, but only if new evidence emerges. "Should credible new information emerge which can be used to identify the specific location of the aircraft, consideration will be given in determining next steps," their joint statement said. As Liow and the other two ministers were speaking at the news conference, representatives of the passengers' families stood outside the building holding placards calling on authorities to keep trying. "Find the plane, ease our pain," read one. "We don't want the suspension to be just a way to let everyone calm down and slowly forget about it," said Grace Subathirai Nathan, a Malaysian whose mother, Anne Daisy, was on the flight. "We want them to be doing something in the interim to look for new information."
Australian Transport Minister Darren Chester said experts will continue to analyze data and inspect debris, but added, "Future searches must have a high level of success to justify raising hopes of loved ones." The Boeing 777 vanished on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. It is believed to have turned back west and then south before dropping into the Indian Ocean west of Australia, where the search has been concentrated. Much of what happened to the plane remains a mystery, though the Malaysian government has concluded that it was deliberately steered off course. Liow said the search, hampered by bad weather and damaged equipment, will end by December.
Although the ministers were at pains to say they were not permanently ending the search, it is evident that it is highly unlikely to continue after that, given how few clues have emerged since the disappearance of the plane. Confirmed and possible debris has been found off East Africa thousands of miles away, but authorities have said the wreckage has provided no information that might help locate the bulk of the aircraft. Some relatives remained hopeful that the search will resume one day. "I feel encouraged. Fearing the worst, we now have something to hang on to," said K.S. Narenderan, who lost his wife, Chandrika Sharma, on the flight. "I read into it a commitment to stay engaged in the search and to hold themselves accountable to pursue the truth."
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Officials are planning the next phase of the deep-sea sonar search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in case the current two-year search of 120,000 square kilometers (46,000 square miles) turns up nothing, said Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief commissioner Greg Hood, who took over leadership of the bureau last month. However, a new search would require a new funding commitment, with Malaysia, Australia and China agreeing in July that the $160 million search will be suspended once the current stretch of ocean southwest of Australia is exhausted unless new evidence emerges that would pinpoint a specific location of the aircraft. "If it is not in the area which we defined, it's going to be somewhere else in the near vicinity," Hood said in an interview this week.
Further analysis of the wing fragment known as a flaperon found on Reunion Island off the African coast in July last year - 16 months after the plane went missing - will hopefully help narrow a possible next search area outside the current boundary. Six replicas of the flaperon will be sent to Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization's oceanography department in the island state of Tasmania where scientists will determine whether it is the wind or the currents that affect how they drift, Hood said. This will enable more accurate drift modeling than is currently available. If more money becomes available, the Australian bureau, which is conducting the search on Malaysia's behalf, plans to fit the flaperons with satellite beacons and set them adrift at different points in the southern Indian Ocean around March 8 next year - the third anniversary of the disaster - and track their movements.
French police officers carry a piece of debris from a plane known as a "flaperon" on the shore of Saint-Andre, Reunion Island. An Australian official says experts hunting for the missing Malaysian airliner are attempting to define a new search area by studying where in the Indian Ocean the first piece of wreckage recovered from the lost Boeing 777 _ a wing flap _ most likely drifted from after the disaster that claimed 239 lives.
Meanwhile, barnacles found on the flaperon and an adjacent wing flap that washed up on Tanzania in June are being analyzed for clues to the latitudes they might have come from. The flap is in the Australian bureau's headquarters in Canberra where it has been scoured for clues by accident investigators. Peter Foley, the bureau's director of Flight 370 search operations since the outset, said the enhanced drift modeling would hopefully narrow the next search area to a band of 5 degrees of latitude, or 550 kilometers (340 miles). "Even the best drift analysis is not going to narrow it down to X-marks-the-spot," Foley said.
Some critics argue that the international working group that defined the current search area - which includes experts from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, Britain's Air Accidents Investigation Branch, the plane's manufacturer Boeing, Australia's Defense Science and Technology Group, satellite firm Inmarsat and electronics company Thales - made a crucial mistake by concluding that the most likely scenario was that no one was at the controls when the plane hit the ocean after flying more than five hours. The airliner veered far off course during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing. What happened to the plane has become one of the biggest mysteries in aviation, with a wide range of theories, including that a hijacker could have killed everyone on board early in the flight by depressurizing the plane.
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A technical report released by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which leads the search, seems to support the theory investigators have long favored: that no one was at the controls of the Boeing 777 when it ran out of fuel and dove at high speed into a remote patch of the Indian Ocean off western Australia in 2014. In recent months, critics have increasingly been pushing the alternate theory that someone was still controlling the plane at the end of its flight. If that was the case, the aircraft could have glided much farther, tripling in size the possible area where it could have crashed and further complicating the already hugely complex effort to find it. But Wednesday's report shows that the latest analysis of satellite data is consistent with the plane being in a "high and increasing rate of descent" in its final moments. The report also said that an analysis of a wing flap that washed ashore in Tanzania indicates the flap was likely not deployed when it broke off the plane. A pilot would typically extend the flaps during a controlled ditching.
Peter Foley, the bureau's director of Flight 370 search operations, has previously said that if the flap was not deployed, it would almost certainly rule out the theory that the plane entered the water in a controlled ditch and would effectively validate that searchers are looking in the right place for the wreckage. "(It) means the aircraft wasn't configured for a landing or a ditching - you can draw your own conclusions as to whether that means someone was in control," Foley told reporters in Canberra on Wednesday. "You can never be 100 percent. We are very reluctant to express absolute certainty." The report's release comes as a team of international and Australian experts begin a three-day summit in Canberra to re-examine all the data associated with the hunt for the plane, which vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board.
HMAS Success scans the southern Indian Ocean, near the coast of Western Australia, as a Royal New Zealand Air Force P3 Orion flies over, while searching for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. A fresh analysis of the final moments of doomed Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, released by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2016, suggests no one was controlling the plane when it plane plunged into the ocean.
More than 20 items of debris suspected or confirmed to be from the plane have washed ashore on coastlines throughout the Indian Ocean. But a deep-sea sonar search for the main underwater wreckage has found nothing. Crews are expect to complete their sweep of the 120,000-square kilometer (46,000-square mile) search zone by early next year and officials have said there are no plans to extend the hunt unless new evidence emerges that would pinpoint a specific location of the aircraft. Australian Transport Minister Darren Chester said experts involved in this week's summit will be working on guidance for any potential future search operations.
Experts have been preemptively trying to define a new search area by studying where in the Indian Ocean the first piece of wreckage recovered from the plane - a wing flap known as a flaperon - most likely drifted from after the plane crashed. Several replica flaperons were set adrift to see whether it is the wind or the currents that primarily affect how they move across the water. The results of that experiment have been factored into a fresh drift analysis of the debris. The preliminary results of that analysis, published in Wednesday's report, suggest the debris may have originated in the current search area, or to its north. The transport bureau cautioned that the analysis is ongoing and those results are likely to be refined.
News from The Associated Press
Wreckage analysis suggests Flight MH370 did not make a controlled descent into the Indian Ocean, says a new report. The Boeing 777 disappeared while flying to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board in March 2014. The report from Australian investigators suggests the aircraft's wing flaps were in a "cruise" position when it hit the ocean surface. It casts further doubt on the theory supported by some analysts that someone was in control of the plane's descent.
MH370: What we know
Among more than 20 items of debris, investigators focused their attention on the recovered right outboard wing flap section. "The purpose of the examination was to inform the end-of-flight scenarios being considered by the search team," the report said. "The right flaperon was probably at, or close to, the neutral position at the time it separated from the wing." The release of the report comes as a team of international aviation and communications experts gather in Canberra to discuss the next stage of the search process.
Investigators continue to search for M370 nearly two years after it disappeared
The report from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is co-ordinating the search, is based on satellite data, flight simulations and a comprehensive analysis of debris which had drifted from the suspected crash site. "Findings of the review will be released after the meeting," Transport Minister Darren Chester said in a statement. "Australia, Malaysia, and China continue to work together to find MH370." The search effort for MH370 has been combing a 120,000sq km area of seabed using underwater drones and sonar equipment deployed from specialist ships. It is expected to draw to a close by the end of the year if it does not find credible new evidence.
MH370: Report suggests flight was not preparing for landing - BBC News
