Missing Flight: Australia Moots System That Found Titanic

Australia plans to employ a system that helped detect the Titanic twenty nine years ago to trace the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 that disappeared on March 8 with 239 passengers on board. The robotic mini-submarine that had been on its underwater mission focusing on an area where four acoustic signals were detected has not been able to track the wreckage of Boeing 777 until now.

Australia also consulted Malaysia, China and the US on the next phase of the search for the plane. A more powerful towed side-scan commercial sonar equipment would probably be deployed, similar to the system that found the Titanic 3,800 m under the Atlantic Ocean in 1985 and the Australian second world war wreck HMAS Sydney in the Indian Ocean, north of the current search area, in 2008, the Associated Press quoted Australia’s Defense Minister David Johnston as saying. Autonomous underwater vehicle Bluefin-21, a US Navy probe equipped with side-scan sonar, “has now completed more than 80 per cent of the focused underwater search area,” Perth-based Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) said in a statement.It has been monitoring the day to day search activities.

The search operations were suspended due to poor weather conditions in the area caused by the tropical Cyclone Jack. The search is still on with the team hoping to detect any underwater signals from the planes black box flight recorders. The Malaysian airliner went missing during its commute from kualalumpur to Beijing in the early hours of Saturday, March 8.

Infoeditor