Monday, April 28, 2014

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Search Area Is Extended After Failure to Find Wreckage: Expanded Zone for Hunt for Missing Plane Is Roughly Equivalent in Size to West Virginia

The Wall Street Journal

By  Robb M. Stewart And  David Winning


Updated April 28, 2014 2:56 a.m. ET


PERTH, Australia—Australia said it would widen the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 significantly, after giving up hope of finding wreckage in a narrow area of the southern Indian Ocean that they believed was the most likely location of the missing jetliner.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said searchers are now betting on finding plane debris along a vast stretch of seabed covering around 23,000 square miles--roughly equivalent in size to the U.S. state of West Virginia. Australia and other nations, including Malaysia and China, have also agreed to bring in privately owned equipment capable of scanning the ocean floor for Flight 370 at depths greater than 2.8 miles (4.5 kilometers).

The search area spans a wide arc of sea extrapolated from a partial digital "handshake" between Flight 370 and an Inmarsat PLC satellite on March 8, some hours after it disappeared from radar screens en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. According to Mr. Abbott and search officials, it would take roughly eight months to scour the expanded area fully. But they warned delays are likely due to bad weather and technical glitches similar to those that disrupted the initial underwater search.

"All of us have stressed all along the difficulty of this search," Mr. Abbott told reporters. "The aircraft plainly cannot disappear. It has to be somewhere."

The decision to widen the search is the latest blow to relatives of the 239 passengers and crew on board Flight 370, already angered by false leads and lapses in coordination among countries and companies trying to find the jetliner. Investigators believe the plane crashed into the Indian Ocean, far from the western coast of Australia, after running out of fuel.

With the battery life having expired on the beacons of the Boeing Co. BA -0.92% 777-200's "black-box" flight recorders, searchers have no new leads. A prolonged search of the Indian Ocean surface using aircraft and ships has found only wooden pallets, rotting fishing nets and other floating garbage. Australian naval vessel ADV Ocean Shield's detection of a stream of electronic signals consistent with the black boxes on four occasions on April 5 and April 8 raised hopes of a breakthrough, but no trace of the plane has yet been found.

On Monday, Australia said an unmanned Bluefin-21 submersible had fully searched a circle of the seafloor with a 10-kilometer radius around where the Ocean Shield had picked up some of those signals. The submersible, which uses sonar to create a three-dimensional map of the ocean floor, didn't find any sign of the missing plane during 15 sorties under water since April 14.

"We are still baffled and disappointed that we haven't been able to find undersea wreckage based on these detections," Mr. Abbott said.

Chief Air Marshal Angus Houston, who is leading the multinational search, compared the challenges now facing searchers looking for Flight 370 to past efforts to find downed jetliners or sunken ships. It took searchers almost two years to find the black-box recorders for Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330 that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro. In that case, searchers had a better idea of where the plane went down yet it still took small robotic submarines nearly 60 trips under the surface before the black boxes were discovered in an area where the ocean floor was nearly 2.5 miles deep, with forbidding peaks and valleys.

Military crews from eight nations, including the U.S., who have spent weeks scouring a vast area of the Indian Ocean surface for floating debris would be stood down. "It is highly unlikely at this stage that we will find any aircraft debris on the ocean surface" as most material would now be waterlogged and have sunk, Mr. Abbott said.

Hopes of finding plane debris on the sea floor depend on investigators' having correctly interpreted satellite and radar data to fix upon the right area to look. Mr. Abbott said Australia wanted the investigation team in Kuala Lumpur to evaluate the data again to pinpoint the area where the plane most likely went down. Still, searchers believe they are broadly looking in the right part of the ocean based on analysis of Flight 370's final communications with the Inmarsat satellite and aircraft performance data provided by Boeing.

Authorities have several options available to them in an expanded search for Flight 370. Other organizations are ready to provide submersibles that can go deeper than Bluefin, including the U.S.-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which helped recover the black boxes from the ill-fated Air France jet. Sonar equipment towed by a ship could cover greater distances than the Bluefin, which had to be brought to the surface every 20 hours so its data could be downloaded.

Still, relying on privately owned equipment is costly. Mr. Abbott said hiring a civilian contractor to search deeper underwater would cost around 60 million Australian dollars (US$57 million), which Australia would seek to pay alongside contributions from other nations such as Malaysia.

For the families of the passengers and crew, frustration continues to build. Malaysia Airlines in an April 25 statement said some of its staff were temporarily detained at the Lido Hotel in Beijing by families who were been unhappy with the details being provided on the missing aircraft. Family members have also criticized Malaysia for not seeking an independent scientific review of the technical analysis that led the search to focus on the current area and objected to the possibility the government could issue death certificates before the plane is found.

Source:    http://online.wsj.com