Hunt to locate missing airliner fraught with challenges

PERTH: The hunt for the ‘resting place’ of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in the Indian Ocean off Australia’s west coast is fraught with challenges.

It is made harder by a thick layer of silt possibly covering the ocean floor, dwindling signals from what could possibly be the plane’s black box and the absence of wreckage to help pinpoint the plane’s exact location.

Commodore Peter Leavy, who is co- ordinating the Australian military’s search contribution, had told the media that evidence of siltation was based on research carried out at a location some 180 km off the current search area.

“Visual search efforts could be greatly impaired as the wreckage or any debris could easily end up sinking into the muck,” he said.

Ocean- floor siltation, he said, could also diffuse signals transmitted by a black box compared to a solid surface like rock which could reflect the transmissions.

Meanwhile, Australia’s Joint Agency Co- ordination Centre (JACC) chief coordinator Air Chief Marshal ( Rtd) Angus Houston said he was apprehensive over the fading signals as the searchers required more signal transmissions to analyse data to determine the Malaysian jetliner’s location.

He noted that the signals might be getting weaker due to the dying batteries of the black box.

Four signals had been detected by the Australian vessel, Ocean Shield, which has been towing a United States’ Navy pinger locator. It can search six times the area than can a drone equipped with sonar, Houston said.

“The better the Ocean Shield can define the area, the easier it’ll be for the autonomous underwater vehicle ( Bluefin 21) to subsequently search for aircraft wreckage,” he said.

The aircraft’s black box, comprising a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder, may unlock the questions as to what happened to MH370 with 239 people aboard which veered thousands of kilometres from its intended Kuala Lumpur-toBeijing route on March 8.

Experts have confirmed that two signals detected on Saturday were consistent with those coming from a man-made device and not natural sounds of marine life in the ocean. — Bernama