April 4, 2014 -- Updated 0937 GMT (1737 HKT)
The underwater hunt for the wreckage and flight recorders of Malaysia
Airlines Flight 370 has started in the southern Indian Ocean. FULL STORY
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The hunt for the missing airliner takes on an increasing urgency as the
ocean floor is scoured for MH370 before locator batteries run out.
FULL STORY
Flight 370: The search goes under water
April 4, 2014 -- Updated 1331 GMT (2131 HKT)
Australia leads Flight 370 search
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- "It'll be remarkable" if the flight recorders are found, a scientist says
- Two naval vessels begin the underwater search using listening technology
- They focus on the "area of highest probability" of where the plane may have hit water
- The visual search resumes Friday with more than two dozen ships and aircraft
If they die, so too could
investigators' best hope of determining what caused the jetliner to
vanish last month from radar screens.
Fourteen aircraft and 11 ships were involved in Friday's activities, reported the Australian agency coordinating the search efforts.
The Australian Maritime
Safety Authority has determined a search area of about 84,000 square
miles (217,000 square kilometers), 1,000 miles (1,700 kilometers)
northwest of Perth.
Weather in the area was good, with visibility greater than six miles (10 kilometers).
Photos: The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
Weather conditions and the MH370 search
Vessels narrow search site for MH370
Prime ministers offer no answers
But searchers were fighting steep odds.
"Really the best we can
do right now is put these assets in the best location -- the best guess
we have -- and kind of let them go," U.S. Navy Cmdr. William Marks told
CNN. "Until we get conclusive evidence of debris, it is just a guess."
Bill Schofield, an
Australian scientist who worked on developing flight data recorders,
said, "If they do find it, I think it'll be remarkable."
The decision about where
in the southern Indian Ocean to focus British and Australian naval ships
equipped with sophisticated listening technology was nothing more than
an educated guess of where the plane may have hit the water.
On Friday, ships did report sightings of objects, but none were linked to plane debris.
The British Royal Navy
survey ship HMS Echo and the Australian naval supply ship Ocean Shield
began searching the depths Friday along a single 150-mile
(240-kilometer) track, said retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, the head of the Australian agency coordinating the search.
The Ocean Shield is equipped with high-tech gear borrowed from the United States:
• The Towed Pinger Locator
25 contains an underwater microphone to detect pings from the jet's
voice and data recorders as deep as 20,000 feet (6,100 kilometers). It
is towed behind a vessel that typically travels at 1 to 5 knots,
depending on the water's depth.
"It is a very slow proceeding," said Capt. Mark M. Matthews, director of ocean engineering.
• The Bluefin-21
is an underwater vehicle that can scour the ocean floor for wreckage
and can also be used to find mines. It is 16.2 feet long, weighs 1,650
pounds, and can work for 25 hours at 3 knots and can operate to a depth
of nearly 15,000 feet.
The ocean in the search area is 6,500 feet to 13,000 feet deep.
Since neither device requires daylight, they can search around the clock.
The HMS Echo also carries advanced sensor and survey equipment.
But time is running out
-- the batteries that power the recorders' beacons are designed to last
at least 30 days from the time they begin operating. The Boeing
777-200ER was carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to
Beijing when it disappeared March 8.
No guarantees MH370 will ever be found
Are we searching in the right area?
Hope unites MH370 families
'It's going to change aviation forever'
If it crashed into the water, its recorders' pingers could go mute as soon as Monday.
The decision about where
to focus the underwater search was based on the same kind of analysis
of radar, satellite and other data that investigators have used to
determine a series of shifting search areas in recent weeks.
"The area of highest
probability as to where the aircraft might have entered the water is the
area where the underwater search will commence," Houston told reporters
Friday. "It's on the basis of data that arrived only recently, and it's
the best data that is available."
'Long way to go'
The search also was continuing above the waves.
Officials have repeatedly warned of a potentially prolonged hunt for the missing passenger jet.
Houston said Friday he expects the search area to continue to be adjusted on "a semi-regular basis."
"We've still got a long way to go," he said.
In the case of Air
France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009,
officials found debris on the surface after five days of searching. But
it took them nearly two years to locate the main pieces of wreckage, the
flight recorders and many of the bodies of those on board.
With Flight 370, the search teams have even fewer clues.
On Thursday, Australian
Prime Minister Tony Abbott warned that "we cannot be certain of ultimate
success in the search" for the Malaysian aircraft. He described it as
the most difficult search "in human history."
Authorities have yet to
explain why the plane flew off course or where it ended up;
investigations into the 227 passengers and 12 crew members have yielded
no suggestion that any of them might have been behind the disappearance.
Families' frustrations
The lack of hard information is frustrating for the families of those on board.
Malaysian officials held
a briefing for Malaysian relatives of those aboard MH370 Thursday
evening at a Kuala Lumpur hotel, but attendees told CNN that nothing new
had emerged.
Mohammad Sahril Shaari, whose cousin Mohammad Razahan Zamani was a honeymooning groom on the plane, said the three-hour session had felt like a "waste of time."
He added, "I was hoping for some news that they had tracked the plane or some parts of it, but nothing like that happened."
Selamat Bin Omar, the
father of another passenger, Malaysian civil flight engineer Mohammed
Khairul Amri Selamat, said officials described in detail the satellite
data that has led investigators to the current search area.
"They could not tell us if the plane crashed," he said. "They said they were still looking into it."
The Malaysian Department
of Civil Aviation denied a request by Malaysian families to release the
audio recording of radio communications among the pilot, co-pilot and
air traffic control, two people who attended the briefing said.
The department's chief,
Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, told the relatives that even the families of
pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah and co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid have not been
allowed to listen to the recording because it is part of an ongoing
investigation, the two attendees said.
Malaysian authorities released a transcript of the recording Tuesday.
"This is an event that
is so unprecedented and I think that is so significant that it can never
be allowed to get off the screens, get off the radar," K.S. Narendran
told CNN's Erin Burnett.
His wife, Chandrika Sharma, was on the flight.
COPY http://edition.cnn.com/AFRICA/
"My concern is that if
we don't really get to the bottom of it, we cannot really be certain
that we are safe and that we are secure every time we board a flight."
CNN's Elizabeth Joseph reported from Perth,
Tom Watkins reported and wrote from Atlanta. CNN's Jethro Mullen, Laura
Smith-Spark, Ben Brumfield, Mitra Mobasherat, Paula Newton and
journalist Ivy Sam contributed to this report.
Tick, tock: What happens after the Malaysian plane's crucial pinger dies?
April 4, 2014 -- Updated 1211 GMT (2011 HKT)
Australia leads Flight 370 search
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- The batteries powering the pinger on MH370 are expected to die in the coming days
- Pingers emit sounds that can direct searchers to flight data and cockpit voice recorders
- A pinger locator is searching underwater, but can only move about 2 to 3 knots
- Searchers also have a robot that can search the ocean bed for wreckage
But it's the sound that
searchers from around the world are desperately hoping to hear -- the
noise of the pinger from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
The problem is, time's
running out. The pinger's batteries will likely die after 30 to 45 days,
and Friday marks the 28th day of the search.
So what happens if the
pulse of the plane sputters out? Is there any hope left of finding the
jet carrying 239 people? Here's what to know about the future of the
search:
Will MH370's black box ever be found?
MH370 families losing trust in officials
Vessels narrow search site for MH370
Vessels narrow search site for MH370
Let's catch up -- what exactly are pingers, and how do you find them?
Every commercial airplane
is required to have pingers -- technically called underwater locator
beacons -- to help find lost planes. One is attached to the flight data
recorder; another to the cockpit voice recorder.
The pings sound about
once every second. The noise is inaudible to the human ear, but devices
such as towed pinger locators (TPLs) can hear the sound from 2 nautical
miles away.
The pinger locator has a
sensor that looks like a 35-inch, 70-pound yellow stingray. It can
recognize the flight recorder's chirps up to 20,000 feet below the
surface of the water.
The Australian ship is dragging a TPL on loan from the United States to help hunt for the plane in the Indian Ocean.
What are the challenges of hunting for the plane by pings?
Not only will the
batteries powering the pinger die after about 30 to 45 days, the sound
can be drowned out by weather, noise or silt.
Also, the pinger locator
has to be towed slowly. It could take days to cover the 240-kilometer
(150-mile) track identified by officials as the latest best guess for
where the plane could be.
"It is a very slow
proceeding search, 2 to 3 knots depending on the depth that you want the
hydrophone, that tow pinger locator trailed at," said Capt. Mark M.
Matthews, the U.S. Navy's head of TPL operations. "It's going to take
time. ... Again, we're searching on what information we do have, our
best guess at where it would have been lost. It's the best we can do at
this time."
So is all hope lost in finding a plane after the pinger dies?
Photos: The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
How to never lose another plane
Are we searching in the right area?
Malaysia: Missing jet probe 'criminal'
No. Take, for example, Air France Flight 447, which disappeared in 2009. A towed pinger locator searched for but couldn't find the plane, which crashed hundreds of miles off the coast of Brazil.
But two years later,
searchers found the flight data recorder and the bulk of the wreckage
using an autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV.
What other kinds of high-tech gadgets can searchers use to find Malaysia Airlines Flight 370?
One of the Australian
search ships has an underwater robot called the Bluefin-21, which can
scour the ocean bed looking for signs of wreckage.
But the robot, on loan
from the United States, hasn't been deployed yet. Matthews said the
Bluefin-21 would only be deployed if the searchers get a clear fix on
the beacons sending out the pings.
Searchers could also use
autonomous underwater vehicles, which are typically used in the oil and
gas industry to conduct deepwater oilfield surveys.
"The smaller ones are
only going to go down to about 5,000 feet," analyst David Soucie said.
"The next class is a much more expensive, much larger device. It's 15 by
25 feet because it adds a lot of battery capability and a lot of
hydraulic capability."
One of the most
sophisticated AUVs owned by Phoenix International was activated and
flown to Perth, Australia, to help with the search for Flight 370. The
device is yellow, 17.2 feet long and has an in-air weight of 1,600
pounds.
It can be lowered 20,000
feet below the water surface and travels 2 to 4.5 knots, using
side-scan sonar to create a map of the seafloor. The rapidly moving
probe is also equipped with a still camera.
"A picture will scroll,
and you will see the seafloor be painted in front of you," said Jami
Cheramie of C&C Technology, whose AUV has been called in to search
for plane debris in the past.
Have these underwater vehicles found plane wrecks in the past?
Yes. AUVs played an
instrumental role in finding the downed Air France flight, the plane
wreckage of Italian fashion designer Vittorio Missoni off the coast of
Venezuela, and the HMS Ark Royal, a ship sunk by a German U-81 submarine
in World War II. The AUV provided black and white images of the
wreckage site.
Will the mystery of Flight 370 be solved once the data recorders are found?
Not necessarily. The
voice recorders have only two hours of recording capacity. And since
officials believe Flight 370 flew almost seven hours beyond the point
where something went terribly wrong, some crucial cockpit sounds have
almost certainly been erased.
On the positive side,
the depletion of the battery will not wipe out data. Data has been known
to survive years in harsh sea water conditions on modern recorders.
CNN's Rose Arce, Rosa Flores, Mike M. Ahlers, Jethro Mullen and Paula Hancocks contributed to this report.
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