Submarine search for Malaysia Airlines MH370 suspended
1 min read 27 Apr 2014, 10:19 AM ISTSearch for the missing plane widens after Bluefin-21 fails to find wreckage
Premium
Sydney: The search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 widened after an unmanned submarine failed to find any wreckage.
“The Bluefin-21 submersible will today scour beyond a circle that was centered on signals detected earlier this month," Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) said in a statement. “The subsea search of the southern Indian Ocean has so far yielded no leads," JACC said.
While the subsea mission continued on Sunday, worsening weather halted air and surface hunts as investigators weighed how to prolong the search for the aircraft, which vanished on 8 March with 239 people on its way to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.
The UK submarine HMS Tireless, which had specialist sonar capabilities, last week left the search zone. The Malaysian Airline System Bhd. flight’s data recorders, designed to emit regular pings, had a battery life of only about 30 days.
Bluefin-21 has so far focused on an area within a 10 kilometre radius based on acoustic pings heard on 8 April. The search zone is about 1,600 kilometres (1,000 miles) northwest of Perth, Australia. Bloomberg
