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Tag: flight 370
New Search Zone Marked Off For Missing Malaysia Airlines Jet

New Search Zone Marked Off For Missing Malaysia Airlines Jet

By Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — Australian authorities said Thursday that a 23,000-square-mile area in the southern Indian Ocean had been designated as a new focus zone where searchers will look for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Analysts who helped define the area said in a report the crew was probably deprived of oxygen and unresponsive in the final hours of the flight.

Experts from Boeing and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board were among the specialists who helped define the zone, based on satellite data and analysis of previous similar incidents.

The new zone, about 1,100 miles west of Perth, Australia, is farther south than where previous intensive search efforts were carried out this spring after the plane vanished March 8 with 239 people aboard. The flight was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it went missing.

Intensive searching involving aircraft, ships, and a robotic submarine in March, April, and May yielded no wreckage or other conclusive signs of the Boeing 777. The cause of the plane’s disappearance remains undetermined, although investigators have said they believe that it was the result of deliberate action of someone aboard the jet.

In the analysts’ report, released Thursday by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, they noted that for the five hours leading up to the aircraft’s final electronic “handshake” with a satellite, there seemed to be no large changes to the aircraft’s flight path, and there was no radio communication.

Based on that and other factors, they concluded, “the final stages of the unresponsive crew / hypoxia event type appeared to best fit the available evidence for the final period of MH370’s flight when it was headed in a generally southerly direction.”

Australia Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said the search was continuing with a mapping of the ocean floor in the newly defined area, to be followed by a comprehensive seafloor search.

The seafloor search, he said, should start around August and be completed within one year. The area is 58 miles wide and 400 miles long, covering an area as big as Lake Huron, the second-largest of the U.S. Great Lakes. By comparison, the area searched with a robotic, sonar-equipped submarine in May was about 330 square miles.

Malaysia and Australia said they were developing a memorandum of understanding to determine exact areas of cooperation in the search and recovery activities and work out financial details. Although Malaysia is officially the lead nation on the search and recovery, Australia has already said it will probably spend about $80 million on the effort by mid-2015.

AFP Photo/ Ted Aljibe

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Missing Malaysia Airlines Jet Not In Search Area, Officials Say

Missing Malaysia Airlines Jet Not In Search Area, Officials Say

By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — The case of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 became ever more mysterious Thursday as Australia claimed that the missing airliner is not in the more than 300-square-mile patch of ocean where authorities have been searching since early April.

The admission came after a U.S. Navy official disclosed that the four “pings” once described as the most promising clues to the plane’s supposed location in the southern Indian Ocean most likely did not come from the plane’s black boxes.

“I wouldn’t say we are back to square one, but maybe to square one-and-a-half,” said Ron Bishop, an Australian search-and-rescue expert and head of aviation at Central Queensland University.

The flight disappeared March 8 on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard. Between April 5 and April 8, officials announced that an Australian ship equipped with a U.S.-made towed pinger locator had detected four signals that matched the frequency of the missing Boeing 777’s black boxes.

But the U.S. Navy’s deputy director of ocean engineers, Michael Dean, said in an interview late Wednesday with CNN that the pings probably didn’t come from the plane.

“Our best theory at this point is that (the pings were) likely some sound produced by the ship,” he was quoted telling CNN.

The Australian task force coordinating the search indirectly confirmed Dean’s assessment in an obliquely worded statement on Thursday.

“The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has advised that the search in the vicinity of the acoustic detections can now be considered complete and in its professional judgment, the area can now be discounted as the final resting place of MH370,” read the statement from the Joint Agency Coordination Center.

The announcement bolstered various conspiracy theorists who believe that the plane was hijacked, and heartened some family members who believe that passengers might still be alive and held hostage somewhere.

“To a family member, it is good news that the plane is not under the water of the Indian Ocean … the hope has come back,” said Sarah Bajc, an American teacher working in Beijing whose partner, Philip Wood, was one of the passengers.

One of the most vocal of the passengers’ relatives, Bajc said that the initial announcement that signals had been detected from the plane struck many family members as too convenient.

“Wow, the first time the ping tracers went into the water they find the ping, like it is magical,” Bajc said.

The setback is an embarrassment for Australia, which has been leading the search. During a visit to China last month, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told reporters, “We are confident that we know the position of the black box flight recorder to within some kilometers.”

But after weeks of scouring the Indian Ocean without finding a single confirmed piece of debris, many scientists began to question the claim of locating the black boxes, saying that the signals could have emanated from pinger transmitters used by marine biologists to track ocean animals or from the ship itself.

Aviation experts have also questioned Inmarsat, the British satellite company, which, based on an analysis of automated communications between the plane’s engine and a satellite, concluded that the plane crashed into the southern Indian Ocean, mostly likely after running out of fuel. Inmarsat released its raw data earlier this week in order to bolster its conclusions.

Some critics have called for search efforts to resume elsewhere, particularly along a northern corridor toward central Asia, which was initially identified a possible route after the plane deviated from its usual course.

“It could be in the Northern Hemisphere, maybe someplace not very populated on land. It could still be in the water somewhere, just in a different place,” said aviation expert Bishop.

The Australian coordinating agency said in its statement Thursday that search efforts will expand to 23,000 square miles along the arc defined by Inmarsat. A Chinese survey ship, Zhu Kezhen, has begun a bathymetric survey, mapping the ocean floor, with assistance from Australian and Malaysian vessels.

AFP Photo/Ted Aljibe

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Private Firms To Search For Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Private Firms To Search For Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

By Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — Private companies specializing in deep ocean search will be hired to continue the quest to find Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Australia’s prime minister said Monday, and the cost could run more than $55 million and take six to eight months.

The U.S. Navy’s robotic submarine Bluefin-21 has searched more than 150 square miles of the floor of the Indian Ocean in an area where investigators thought they had detected pings from the Boeing 777’s black box transmitters in early April. We are “baffled and disappointed” that no wreckage had been found 52 days into the search, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said at a news conference in Canberra, Australia.

Now, Abbott said, the undersea search area will be expanded from the most probable impact zone to a much wider area totaling 21,621 square miles.

Side-scan sonar devices towed behind ships will be used to traverse the expanded search area, said retired Australian Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, who has been coordinating search efforts from Perth, Australia.

Abbott indicated that air searches for surface debris would be discontinued imminently. “It is highly unlikely we will find any debris on the ocean surface” now, he said, explaining that any material from the plane probably would have become waterlogged and sunk by this time.

“We are moving to a phase focused on searching the ocean floor over a much larger area,” Abbott said. So far, the visual search area has encompassed 334 flights totaling more than 3,000 hours and scoured 1.7 million square miles of the ocean surface.

Until the private companies can begin working, Abbott said, the Bluefin-21 as well as Australian, Malaysian and Chinese ships will continue operating in the search area. An Australian military plane will remain on standby in case suspected wreckage is identified, he added.

“I want the families to know, I want the world to know, Australia will not shirk its responsibility,” Abbott said. “We will not let people down.”

Asked about his comments several weeks ago that investigators were close to finding the wreckage, Abbott said he was “not in the business of making excuses for failure” but added that the search was perhaps the most difficult in history.

“Enormous efforts have been made,” he said, describing the jet’s disappearance as an “extraordinary mystery.”

Houston said investigators believe they are looking in the right area. “We were quietly optimistic,” he said, that the Bluefin-21 would find the jet wreckage.

But he noted that it took more than two years to find the undersea wreckage of Air France Flight 447 in the Atlantic Ocean after it crashed in 2009, and that in that case, the plane was found just 6.5 nautical miles from its last known position. Information about the last known position of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is much less robust.

Asked about the cost of the search so far, Abbott declined to provide specifics, saying authorities had been using military assets that governments would be “paying for anyway.”

The Boeing 777 vanished March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people aboard. Authorities have said they believe a deliberate act by someone aboard the aircraft led to its disappearance, but they have not offered more specifics.

AFP Photo/Eric A. Pastor

Oil Slick Not Linked To Missing Jet, Australians Say

Oil Slick Not Linked To Missing Jet, Australians Say

By Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times

 

BEIJING — Australian authorities coordinating the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 said Thursday that lab tests have shown an oil slick found in the search area last Sunday is not aircraft engine fuel or hydraulic fluid.

Searchers are now using a robotic submarine, the Bluefin-21, to look for wreckage on the floor of the Indian Ocean more than 1,000 miles northwest of Perth, Australia.

The Bluefin-21 has a rated depth of 4,500 meters, or 2.8 miles, and shortly after it was deployed on its first run this week, it returned to the surface several hours later because it reached that depth and an automatic safety system sent it back up.

However, search coordinators said Thursday that the submarine’s owner-operator, Phoenix International, which has a contract with the U.S. Navy, has determined that the unmanned vehicle can operate at deeper depths.

“This expansion of the operating parameters allows the Bluefin-21 to search the sea floor within the predicted limits of the current search area,” authorities said.

David Kelly, CEO of Bluefin Robotics, said Monday that Phoenix had upgraded the Bluefin-21 just prior to its deployment to the Indian Ocean and had tested it in Hawaii.

Authorities said previous U.S. Navy estimates that it would take six weeks to two months for the Bluefin-21 to complete its survey of the designated search area were incorrect, but they did not give a revised time frame.

“Since the U.S. Navy provided comment some days ago, the underwater search has been significantly narrowed through detailed acoustic analysis conducted on the four signal detections” made by the towed pinger locator on the Australian ship Ocean Shield, authorities said in a statement. “This analysis has allowed the definition of a reduced and more focused underwater search area.”

Flight 370 vanished March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard.

AFP Photo/Chaideer Mahyuddin