Seabed drone to look for jet wreckage

the Indian Ocean. But some of the contacts do exhibit man-made properties and therefore must be investigated before they can be eliminated as having come from the plane, the agency said.

Officials have previously said that more than 20 sonar contacts that crews have picked up in recent months require closer examination by a sonar-equipped underwater drone. They are between 2700km and 1900km from the Australian port of Fremantle where the search ships are based.

Poor weather during the southern hemisphere winter has until now prevented the ships from deploying the drone. With the weather improving, the Chinese vessel Dong Hai Jiu 101 is being fitted with a video camera-equipped remotely operated vehicle that will scrutinise the sonar contacts.

Crews have picked up hundreds of sonar contacts of interest throughout the two-year hunt. The contacts are grouped into three classification levels based on their likelihood of being linked to the plane. Contacts dubbed “classification 1” are considered the most likely to have come from the aircraft. None of the recent sonar contacts that the drone will investigate are classification 1. There have only been two contacts that fit into that category thus far; one turned out to be an old shipwreck, and the other was a rock field.

Search crews have so far failed to find the main underwater wreckage of the plane, which vanished on March 8, 2014, during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. Officials had said the search would be over by December. The transport bureau said it is now likely to take until January or February to complete. – AP