Robotic mission hits a snag
Malaysia jet search area too deep for US Navy’s Bluefin 21, search to continue
perth — A robotic submarine hunting for the missing Malaysian jet aborted its first mission after only six hours, surfacing with no new clues when it exceeded its maximum depth along the floor of the Indian Ocean, officials said on Tuesday.
Search crews sent the US Navy’s Bluefin 21 into the depths on Monday to begin scouring the seabed for the missing Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 after failing for six days to detect any new signals believed to be coming from its black boxes.
But the 16-hour mission was cut short when the unmanned sub, which is programmed to hover 30 metres (100 feet) above the seabed, entered a patch that was deeper than its maximum depth of 4,500 metres, the search coordination centre and the US Navy said.
A built-in safety feature returned the Bluefin to the surface and it was not damaged, they said.
The data collected by the sub was later analysed and no sign of the missing plane was found, the US Navy said. Crews were shifting the Bluefin’s search area away from the deepest water and were hoping to send it back on another mission later on Tuesday.
Search authorities had known the primary search area for Flight 370 was near the limit of the Bluefin’s dive capabilities. Deeper-diving submersibles have been evaluated, but none is yet available to help.
A safety margin would have been included in the Bluefin’s programme to protect the device from harm if it went a bit deeper than its 4,500-metre limit, said Stefan Williams, a professor of marine robotics at the University of Sydney.
“Maybe some areas where they are doing the survey are a little bit deeper than they are expecting,” he said. “They may not have very reliable prior data for the area.”
Meanwhile, officials were investigating an oil slick about 5,500 metres (3.4 miles) from the area where the last underwater sounds were detected.
Crews collected an oil sample and sent it back to Perth in western Australia for analysis, a process that will take several days, said Angus Houston, the head of the joint agency coordinating the search off Australia’s west coast.
He said it does not appear to be from any of the ships in the area, but cautioned against jumping to conclusions about its source.
The Bluefin can create a threedimensional sonar map of any debris on the ocean floor. But the search is more challenging in this area because the seabed is covered in silt that could potentially cover part of the plane.
“What they’re going to have to be looking for is contrast between hard objects, like bits of a fuselage, and that silty bottom,” Williams said. “With the types of sonars they are using, if stuff is sitting up on top of the silt, say a wing was there, you could likely see that ... but small items might sink down into the silt and be covered and then it’s going to be a lot more challenging.” — kuala lumpur — Any data that is eventually recovered from the “black box” of missing flight MH370 will be publicly released, Malaysia’s transport minister pledged on Tuesday, as the government battles widespread criticism over the transparency of its investigation.
“It’s about finding the truth. And when we... find out the truth, definitely we have to reveal what’s in the black box,” Hishammuddin Hussein said.
“So there is no question of it not being released.”
Hishammuddin said at the weekend that Malaysia’s attorney general had been sent abroad to confer with the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and determine which country will have custody of the plane’s black box, if it is ever found.
But he shrugged off the importance of the custody issue on Tuesday. “I don’t think it’s important who gets custody as far as I’m concerned,” he said.
Opposition politicians have repeatedly called for more transparency on MH370, complaining that the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition has declined to share information with its bitter foes in the parliamentary opposition. —