International
Geoscience Australia/AFP
The hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 entered a new phase Monday with the resumption of underwater search efforts for the aircraft that mysteriously vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing six months ago.
Until now experts had been concentrating on mapping the seabed in the southern Indian Ocean search zone where the plane carrying 239 people is believed to have crashed.
The Malaysian-contracted GO Phoenix vessel, the first of three search ships, has now arrived in the area and is scanning the ocean floor for the jet, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said.
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Two additional vessels – equipped with sonar, video cameras and jet-fuel sensors – will join the GO Phoenix in coming weeks. Each ship will be staffed with 25-35 people working around the clock exploring the 23,000 square-mile search area. The Ocean’s average depth of 2.5 miles has complicated recovery efforts.
Australia has been spearheading the hunt for the plane. After massive air and sea surface searches failed to locate any sign of the Boeing 777-200, and an undersea probe also came up empty-handed, experts analyzed satellite transmissions from the plane to pinpoint the best area to conduct their search.
Given the unknown nature of the ocean floor in that area — found to include extinct volcanoes, sheer ridges and deep trenches — a bathymetric survey to map the seabed was considered vital before an underwater search could begin.
The survey, which mapped some 44,000 square miles of the remote area since May, has paved the way for the GO Phoenix’s work.
The GO Phoenix will tow sensitive underwater equipment over the seabed in the hunt for irregularities, such as large parts of the aircraft that could still be in intact, the ATSB has said.
"With this system, detailed high resolution images of the search area will be collected and analyzed in real time ... in an effort to locate the wreckage of MH370," Phoenix International said in a statement late last month.
Australian authorities have said they are "cautiously optimistic" that the plane will be located in the refined search zone, although they have said the process could take up to a year.
"What we have is a plan to cover the high priority areas, (but) we don't really have any sense of when in the course of that year we're likely to find something," ATSB chief Martin Dolan told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
"We're by no means 100 percent confident but we know we're searching the highest probability areas and we remain cautiously optimistic we'll be successful," he said.
Al Jazeera and wire services
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