Mini-submarine fails to detect any sign of MH370 after eight dives
Despite having scoured about two-thirds of the focused underwater search area in the Indian Ocean, no sign of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has been found, a statement from the Joint Agency Coordination centre (JACC) in Perth, Australia, said this morning.
It said the Bluefin-21 autonomous underwater vehicle had completed its eighth mission underwater and would be deployed again today.
The focused underwater search area is defined as a circle of 10km radius around the second signal detection by the towed pinger locator on April 8.
Up to 10 military aircraft and 11 ships will also assist in today's search for the aircraft with 239 people on board, the JACC statement said.
The Malaysia Airlines plane had been missing since March 8 after leaving Kuala Lumpur International Airport for Beijing, China.
The JACC statement said the Australian Maritime Safety Authority had planned a visual search area totaling approximately 49,491 square kilometres for today.
"The centre of the search area lies approximately 1,741 kilometres north west of Perth," the statement said.
An aviation expert had added to the pessimism surrounding the search for flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean, saying the area's silty condition could make detection by sonar more difficult as the debris would have sunk further.
"If we ever find parts from MH370, it may be when seat-cushions or other lightweight debris washes up on the shore of Australia or Antarctica. Unfortunately, I think this is the most probable scenario," David Learmount had written on aviation news portal Flightgobal.
He had said in the case of the Air France flight 447 which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, investigators knew that the plane, an Airbus A330, had "belly-flopped into the water" with very low forward speed, making wreckage parts easier to surface.
"We have no idea how MH370 impacted the water, but if it hit the surface much faster than AF447 and with a nose-down attitude, the pieces would be smaller and thus more difficult to detect," he had added.
With no sighting of any debris connected to the missing Boeing 777-200, Learmount had said the current search area, the result of calculation of satellite data rather than because of any floating wreckage, may not be the right place to look. – April 21, 2014.
