Australia, US join Pacific search for sunken ferry survivors

WELLINGTON: Australian and US aircraft will join the search for survivors from a ferry which sank with 50 people aboard in the remote Pacific, rescue officials said yesterday.

A New Zealand Air Force Orion plane, which on Sunday found seven survivors drifting in a dinghy, is already combing a search area larger than Italy.

The survivors — three men, three women and a 14-year- old girl — had been aboard the MV Butiraoi, which set off from Kiribati on Jan 18.

Officials in the island nation raised the alarm on Friday after hearing nothing from the vessel since its departure.

An Australian Maritime Safety Authority jet and a US Coast Guard Hercules agreed to join the search yesterday, Rescue Coordination Centre NZ said.

The centre’s senior search and rescue officer Greg Johnston said the remote area where the ferry went missing made it a challenging operation.

He said 385,000 square kilometres had already been searched and the area was constantly expanding as current modelling was used to estimate where survivors could have drifted.

NZDF Air Commodore Darryn Webb said anyone who was still alive would have been adrift for about a week.

“There’s a thought that there could be a liferaft with other survivors on it... we remain optimistic that we may find more survivors,” he told Radio New Zealand. — AFP