Glitch forces mini-submarine scouring seabed for MH370 to resurface, says search team
The autonomous underwater vehicle Bluefin-21, which is scouring the seabed of the Indian Ocean in the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, was forced to resurface this morning to rectify a technical issue, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) in Perth said in a statement today.
The JACC said while on deck, the mini-submarine's data was downloaded.
The Bluefin-21 was then redeployed and it is currently continuing its underwater search.
Initial analysis of the data downloaded this morning indicates no significant detections.
The mini-submarine was deployed for the second time last night from the Australian navy ship, Ocean Shield after its first mission on Monday had to be aborted after six hours following a breach in the machine's maximum operating depth, the US navy had said.
Data from that first dive also showed nothing of interest.
American search authorities had said that the underwater drone sent to search for a missing Malaysian jetliner on the floor of the Indian Ocean could take up to two months to scour a 600 sq km area where the plane was believed to have sunk.
Authorities, who soon plan to scale back the air and surface search, are confident they know the approximate position of wreckage of the Boeing 777, some 1,550 km northwest of Perth, and are moving ahead on the basis of four acoustic signals they believe are from its black box recorders.
But having not heard a "ping" for a week and with the batteries on the locator beacons two weeks past their 30-day expected life, the slow-moving "autonomous underwater vehicle" was launched on Monday to try and locate wreckage.
"The AUV takes six times longer to cover the same area as the towed-pinger locator. It is estimated that it will take the AUV anywhere from six weeks to two months to scan the entire search area," Lieutenant J. G. Daniel S. Marciniak, a spokesman for the US Seventh Fleet, had said in a statement.
The introduction of the drone marks a new slower-paced phase in the search for Malaysia Airlines MH370 which disappeared on March 8 and is presumed to have crashed thousands of kilometres off course with the loss of all 239 people on board.
Up to 11 military aircraft, three civil aircraft and 11 ships will assist in today's search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
Today the Australian Maritime Safety Authority has planned a visual search area totalling approximately 55,151 sq km. The centre of the search areas lies about 2,000 km northwest of Perth. – April 16, 2014.
