An Australian ship was Tuesday trawling a small patch of the Indian Ocean trying to resume contact with electronic pulses detected earlier that may come from the flight recorders of a missing Malaysia Airlines passenger plane.
If contact is resumed, a Bluefin—21 unmanned mini—submarine would be lowered from the vessel Ocean Shield to scan for wreckage, first with side sonar and then with a camera.
Angus Houston, the former Australian armed forces chief heading the search, said the submersible could be operational within hours.
“I imagine we’d be getting very close to that,” Houston told Australian national broadcaster ABC.
A month has passed since the Boeing 777 disappeared during a night flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.
Fourteen planes and 14 ships are scouring a 77,580—square—kilometre area of ocean for the wreckage of flight MH370.
Time is running out for the multinational team because the batteries in the emergency locator beacon and the cockpit voice and data recorders are now past their regulation shelf—life.
“As a consequence, there’s a chance the locator beacon is about to cease transmission or has ceased transmission,” Houston said.
The Ocean Shield picked up transmissions during two separate 7-kilometre runs late Saturday. The first detection lasted more than 2 hours; the second, lasting 13 minutes, picked up not one but two bleeps.
Houston said that “what we’re probably looking at on the second run is ... not only the main emergency locator beacon but also the cockpit voice recorder.” The signals picked up by the US Navy—supplied pinger locator towed by the Ocean Shield were close enough — 1,645 metres apart — for them to come from the same source on the seabed.
“What we’re after is wreckage — a debris field, as some people would say,” the former pilot said.
The search is aided by good weather, but Houston cautioned against discounting the immense complexities of the search.
The seabed where wreckage may lie is the same 4,500—metre depth as the Bluefin—21’s maximum operating limit.
“It can’t go deeper than that, so it’s quite incredible how finely balanced all of this is,” he said. “It’s a long painstaking process, particularly when you start searching the depths of the ocean floor.”