Underwater search for MH370 resumes today
The underwater search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 resumed today in the Indian Ocean with the deployment of the Bluefin-21 at about 2am, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre based in Perth said.
Bluefin-21 will search for a week the remaining areas in the vicinity of the acoustic signals detected in early April by the Towed-Pinger Locator deployed from Ocean Shield.
Today’s search is to enable the search team to discount or confirm the area of the acoustic signals as the final resting place of the Boeing 777-200ER (9M-MRO), said JACC.
Ocean Shield will depart from the search area on May 28.
The Chinese survey ship Zhu Kezhen departed from Fremantle yesterday to begin mapping the ocean floor of the areas provided by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
On Tuesday, Reuters reported British satellite company Inmarsat as saying it would release all the data it used to determine the final path of flight MH370 to help reassure relatives that the authorities were searching in the right location.
Inmarsat said in a joint statement with the Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) the data communication logs, or raw data, would be released along with an explanation of the analysis used to work out the route.
The Boeing 777 carrying 239 passengers and crew disappeared on March 8 during a scheduled service between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing and is believed to have gone down in the Indian Ocean, off western Australia.
In the hours after the aircraft disappeared, an Inmarsat satellite picked up a handful of pings from the flight, indicating that the plane had continued flying for hours and helping narrow the search to an area of the Indian Ocean.
The plane has yet to be found and there have been growing calls from the relatives of passengers for more transparency from the authorities conducting the search.
An Inmarsat spokesman said the data communications log comprised 14 pieces of data from seven "handshakes", or pairs of numbers, between the aircraft and the satellite. One number is time information, the other is frequency.
"Everything that was done, was done from those 14 numbers," he said.
The data and analysis will be available in about a week. – May 22, 2014.
