Mini-sub deploys to scour ocean depths in MH370 hunt

PERTH  - Australia decided Monday to deploy a mini-submarine to scour the unmapped Indian Ocean seabed for Malaysian jet MH370 at a daunting depth of 4,500 metres (15,000 feet), ending the search for black-box signals.

Angus Houston, who heads the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, also revealed that an oil slick had been sighted in the area of the search led by the Australian vessel Ocean Shield far off Perth.

"Ocean Shield will cease searching with the towed pinger locator later today and deploy the autonomous underwater vehicle Bluefin-21 as soon as possible," Houston said, adding it could enter the water later Monday.

"We haven't had a single detection in six days so I guess it's time to go underwater," he told a news conference.

"We anticipate deploying it this evening."

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went missing on March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. The reason why the plane came to crash in the southern Indian Ocean remains a mystery.

So far no debris has been found despite an enormous search involving ships and planes from several nations. But Houston said about two litres of the newly spotted oil slick had been collected for testing.

"I stress the source of the oil is yet to be determined but the oil slick is approximately 5,500 metres downwind... from the vicinity of the detections picked up by the towed pinger locator on Ocean Shield," he said.

It would be a number of days before the oil could be conclusively tested ashore, but Houston said he did not think it was from one of the many ships involved in the search.

"It's very close to where the transmissions are coming from and we'll investigate it and that will take a little bit of time, given that we're in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

"We don't think it's from the ships, so where is it from? So it's another lead to pursue."

- 'Slow and painstaking' -

Houston emphasised that it was 38 days since the Boeing 777 vanished and the batteries powering the black box tracker beacons had a life of only 30 days.

Ocean Shield has detected four signals linked to aircraft black boxes, helping to narrow down the vast search zone. But the last confirmed ping came on Tuesday last week and officials suspect the batteries are now dead.

The retired air chief marshal stressed the enormous difficulties in working at great depths in such a remote location.

"This is an area that is new to man," Houston said, expecting to find a lot of silt.

"It's not sharply mountainous or anything, it's more flat and almost rolling, but we understand... that part of the India Ocean has a lot of silt on the bottom.

"And if we have silt on the bottom, that can be quite layered, quite deep and that will complicate how things are on the bottom. It's around 4,500 metres."

The Bluefin-21 is equipped with side-scanning sonar and will initially focus on 40 square kilometres (15 square miles) of seabed in the vicinity of the detected signals.

But Houston explained that the US-made vessel operates slowly, with each mission taking a minimum of 24 hours to complete.

The device needs two hours to reach the bottom, where it will work for 16 hours producing a high-resolution 3D map before surfacing in another two hours.

Downloading and analysing data requires a further four hours.

But while the mini-sub could take the search a step closer towards visually identifying any wreckage, Houston repeated his longstanding note of caution that nothing was guaranteed.

He noted that after Air France Flight AF447 crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009, it took nearly two years to retrieve the black boxes from a depth of 3,900 metres.

"However, this is the best lead we have and it must be pursued vigorously. Again I emphasise that this will be a slow and painstaking process."

The Bluefin-21, a 4.93-metre long sonar device, weighs 750 kilograms and can operate down to 4,500 metres -- roughly the depth of the ocean floor where the pings were detected.

Houston also said the search for floating material from the plane would end in the coming days.

"The chances of any floating material being recovered have greatly diminished and it will be appropriate to consult with Australia's partners to decide the way ahead later this week," he added.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Signal detected in MH370 search 'consistent' with black box

PERTH -- A signal detected by a Chinese ship searching the Indian Ocean for flight MH370 is "consistent" with the type emitted from the aircraft black box, according to the Australian ex-military chief in charge of the hunt.

China's official Xinhua news agency reported Saturday that a black box detector on board the Chinese search ship had picked up a signal at a frequency of 37.5kHz.

The Underwater Acoustic Beacons on the MH370 flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder both operate at that frequency, a spokesman for Honeywell Aerospace, the manufacturers of the black boxes on board the missing plane, told AFP.

Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, head of coordination in the search, said the reported characteristics of the signal "are consistent with the aircraft black box".

A number of white objects were also sighted on the surface about 90 kilometres from the detection area, he said, according to a statement by the Joint Agency Coordination Center (JACC).

However, he warned: "There is no confirmation at this stage that the signals and the objects are related to the missing aircraft."

In a statement Sunday, the JACC reiterated that the signals had not been verified.

Up to 10 military planes, two civil planes and 13 ships will scour the remote waters on Sunday, almost a month to the day since the plane carrying 239 passengers and crew disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8.

The hunt will concentrate on about 216,000 square kilometres of the Indian Ocean around 2,000 kilometers northwest of Perth.

Cautious reception

The Chinese search ship Haixun 01 picked up the pulse signal at about 25 degrees south latitude and 101 degrees east longitude, Xinhua said in a brief dispatch Saturday.

Australia has asked China for more information, Houston said, and was considering deploying search assets to the area.

Chinese officials also warned the signal had not yet been identified.

"Suspected pulse signal picked up by Haixun 01 has not been identified yet," the China Maritime Search and Rescue Center said on a verified microblog.

Australian Defence Minister David Johnston echoed the words of caution.

"This is not the first time we have had something that has turned out to be very disappointing," he told ABC television.

Australian and British vessels are currently involved in a round-the-clock underwater search hoping to pick up a signal from the black box, but the battery powering those emissions is nearing the end of its roughly 30-day life span.

The Ocean Shield, which is carrying a US Navy black box detector, and HMS Echo, which has a similar capability, are searching a 240-kilometre track of ocean in hopes of detecting sonic pings from the recorder.

However, progress is painstaking as vessels must move slowly to improve readings, and officials have acknowledged there is no solid evidence the plane went down in that stretch of sea.

Unique frequency

Anish Patel, president of US black box beacon manufacturer Dukane Seacom, said he was "highly sceptical" about the Chinese report Saturday.

"I would like to understand why not two signals -- there should be a second beacon from either the flight data recorder or the voice recorder. So if the recorders are adjacent or within reasonable proximity... they should have detected possibly two signals," he told CNN.

"So let's get some additional assets in the water so we can corroborate, before we get everyone's hopes up, before we disappoint these families one more time I think we need to corroborate."

But Charitha Pattiaratchi, a professor of coastal oceanography at the University of Western Australia, said the news was exciting.

"The 35.7 kHz is a man-made noise. There's not another noise at that frequency," he told AFP, adding that this was exactly why black box pingers were set at this frequency.

"A whale or a dolphin or rain or an underwater earthquake... they have a completely different frequency."

Earlier in Kuala Lumpur, Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said Malaysia would, in line with international agreements, appoint an independent "investigator in charge" to lead an international team to probe what happened to MH370.

The team will include Australia, China, the United States, Britain and France.

Hishammuddin again declined to provide any detail from Malaysia's ongoing investigation, however, saying he remained focused on finding the plane and its black box.

Malaysian authorities believe satellite readings indicate MH370 crashed in the Indian Ocean, far off Australia's western coastline, after veering dramatically off course.

But no proof has been found that would indicate a crash site, and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has described the oceanic search as "the most difficult in human history."

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Weather suspends hunt for missing Malaysian jet

PERTH - High winds and icy weather halted the air search on Thursday for a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet presumed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, just as new satellite images emerged showing what could be a large debris field from the plane.

The latest possible sightings of wreckage from Flight MH370, which went missing 19 days ago, were captured by Thai and Japanese satellites in roughly the same remote expanse of sea as earlier images reported by France, Australia and China.

"We detected floating objects, perhaps more than 300," Anond Snidvongs, the head of Thailand's space technology development agency, told Reuters. "We have never said that the pieces are part of MH370 but have so far identified them only as floating objects."

A Japanese satellite also captured images of 10 objects which could be part of the plane, Kyodo news agency quoted the government as saying on Thursday.

An international search team of 11 military and civilian aircraft and five ships had been heading for an area where more than 100 objects that could be from the Boeing 777 had been identified by French satellite pictures earlier this week, but severe weather forced the planes to turn back.

"The forecast in the area was calling for severe icing, severe turbulence and near-zero visibility," said Lieutenant Commander Adam Schantz, the officer in charge of the U.S. Navy Poseidon P8 maritime surveillance aircraft detachment.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is coordinating the effort, confirmed flights had been called off but said ships continued to search despite battering waves.

"It's the nature of search and rescue. It's a fickle beast," Flying Officer Peter Moore, the captain of an Australian AP-3C Orion, told Reuters aboard the plane after it turned around 600 miles from the search zone.

"This is incredibly important to us. The reality is we have 239 people whose families want some information and closure."

 

NEW IMAGES

The Malaysian airliner, on a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, is thought to have crashed with the loss of all 239 people aboard after flying thousands of miles off course.

The objects spotted by the Thai satellite were between 2 metres (6.5 ft) and 16 metres (52 ft) in size and were in an area around 2,700 km (1,680 miles) southwest of Perth, Snidvongs said.

The pictures were taken on Monday, a day after a satellite operated by France-based Airbus Defence & Space spotted 122 potential objects in a 400 sq km (155 sq mile) area of ocean around 2,500 km southwest of the Western Australian city.

The pictures by the Japanese satellite were taken on Wednesday of debris about 2,500 km (1,553 miles) southwest of Perth, the biggest measuring 4 by 8 metres, a government official said.

MH370 vanished from civilian radar screens less than an hour after take-off and investigators believe someone on board may have shut off the plane's communications systems. Theories range from a hijacking to sabotage or a possible suicide by one of the pilots, but investigators have not ruled out technical problems.

Partial military radar tracking showed the plane turning west off its scheduled course over the South China Sea and then recrossing the Malay Peninsula, apparently under the control of a skilled pilot.

The logistical difficulties of the search have been highlighted by the failure so far to get a lock on possible debris, despite the now numerous satellite images and direct visual sightings from aircraft and ships.

The area being searched by crews from Australia, the United States, New Zealand, China, Japan and South Korea has some of the deepest and roughest waters in the world.

One day had already been lost earlier this week because weather conditions were too dangerous, but Australia's Bureau of Meteorology said the forecast for Friday was better.

RELATIVES DISTRAUGHT

Recovery of wreckage could unlock clues about why and how the plane diverted so far off course in one of aviation's most puzzling mysteries.

The United States has sent an undersea Navy drone and a high-tech black box detector which will be fitted to an Australian ship due in Perth in the coming days.

The so-called black boxes - the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder - record what happens during flight, but time is running out to pick up their locator beacons, which stop about a month after a crash due to limited battery life.

The prolonged and so far fruitless search and investigation have taken a toll, with dozens of distraught relatives of 150 Chinese passengers clashing with police and accusing Malaysia of "delays and deception".

China has repeatedly voiced its frustration with the efforts of Malaysia to find the plane. China's special envoy to Malaysia said on Thursday that Beijing was doing its best to push the Southeast Asian nation to coordinate the international search effort, state news agency Xinhua said.

Chinese insurance companies have started paying compensation to the families of passengers, Xinhua reported separately.

The family of Paul Weeks, a New Zealander on board the Malaysia Airlines flight, said they had been angered by the way the airline has dealt with the families of passengers.

"The whole situation has been handled appallingly, incredible insensitivity, lack of information," Weeks's sister, Sara Weeks, told Radio Live in New Zealand.

She said her brother's wife had only received a text message to say that her husband was presumed dead. (Additional reporting by Suilee Wee in Beijing, Niluksi Koswanage in Kuala Lumpur, Jane Wardell in Sydney, Gyles Beckford in Wellington, Stanley White in Tokyo and Amy Sawitta Lefevre in Bangkok; Writing by Lincoln Feast and Alex Richardson; Editing by Nick Macfie)

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com