Search for MH370 enters 'critical juncture': Time to set a deadline for futile efforts?

KUALA LUMPUR - The effort to find missing flight MH370 is at a "very critical juncture", Malaysia's transport minister said Saturday as authorities mull whether to reassess a challenging search of the Indian Ocean seabed that has so far found nothing.

"The search for today and tomorrow is at a very critical juncture. So I appeal for everybody around the world to pray and pray hard that we find something to work on," Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said.

The jet is believed to have crashed in deep and remote waters far off Western Australia.

But with no results from the multi-national search operation for the Boeing 777, which vanished on March 8 carrying 239 people, Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Thursday set a one-week deadline to locate the plane by mini-submarine.

The Australian-led search effort is relying on a single US Navy submersible sonar scanning device to scour an uncharted seabed at depths of around 4,500 metres (15,000 feet) or more.

Technical hitches, including the fact that the torpedo-shaped Bluefin-21 is operating at the extent of its depth limit, made for a slow start to the search.

Launched from an Australian naval vessel, the device has so far made six deep-sea scanning runs but has detected nothing.

"We have pursued every possible lead presented to us at this stage, and with every passing day the search has become more difficult," Hishammuddin, who is heading up the Malaysian government's response to MH370, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur.

As the search and rescue effort expected to be the costliest in aviation history wears on, authorities have indicated alternative methods may be needed, including possibly deeper-diving devices.

Hishammuddin said adjustments "may include widening the scope of the search and utilising other assets that could be relevant in the search operation", but he stressed the search would not be abandoned.

source: interaksyon.com

Mini-sub deployed to scour ocean depths in hunt for MH370

PERTH -- Australia was Monday deploying a mini-sub to scour the Indian Ocean seabed for missing Malaysian jet MH370 at the daunting depth of 4,500 meters (15,000 feet), abandoning the search for black-box transmissions six days after the last ping was heard.

Angus Houston, the former air marshal who heads the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, revealed also that an oil slick had been sighted in the area of the search led by the Australian navy 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 Friday evening.

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

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went missing on March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, and how the plane may have come 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 liters 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 meters 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 emphasized that it was 38 days since the Boeing 777 vanished and the batteries powering the black box tracker beacons had a shelf 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 Bluefin-21 is equipped with side-scanning sonar and will initially focus on 40 square kilometers (15 square miles) of seafloor 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 analyzing 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 long-standing 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 meters.

"However, this is the best lead we have and it must be pursued vigorously. Again I emphasize 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 meters -- roughly the depth of the ocean floor where the pings were detected.

Houston also said the search for floating material from the plane would be concluded 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: interaksyon.com