A multinational MH370 Malaysia Airlines flight search team deployed an unmanned mini submarine for the first time on April 14, 2014, Monday.
The drone, Bluefin-21, would be dive deep to search for wreckage area on the sea floor.
The team continues using a towed pinger locator to listen for signals from the plane's “black boxes”. Unfortunately, no fresh signals have been registered since April, 8, 2014. This may mean that the batteries of the flight recorders have expired.
The Bluefin 21 is being hoisted aboard an Australian vessel the Ocean Shield. Up to 12 planes and 15 ships are involved in today’s (Monday’s) search for the plane.
The Bluefin-21 - an almost 5m-long underwater autonomous vehicle that can create a sonar map of the sea floor - will search for wreckage in an area defined by four signals heard last week.
Experts warned that the submersible search would be a long, "painstaking" process that might, in the end, yield no results.
Each Bluefin-21 mission will last 24 hours: 16 hours spent on the ocean floor, 4 hours of diving and resurfacing time, and 4 hours to download data.
Australian officials have said previously that they are confident they are searching in the right area for the missing plane.
Recovering the flight recorders is seen as key to understanding what happened to the missing MH370 Boeing 777-200.
It would be recalled that MH370 flight went missing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board. It was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, when it lost contact with air traffic controllers over the South China Sea.
No comments:
Post a Comment