Thursday, April 3, 2014
The search for #MH370 is moving underwater 26 days after the Boeing 777-200 disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 227 passengers and a crew of 12. Searchers are running out of time as batteries on the black boxes approach their 30 day expiration and vast amounts of sea trash and inclement weather continue to prevent identification of debris from the crash.
The Wall Street Journal reports,
This week, the search was joined by a U.K. military submarine equipped to detect signals from the flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders, whose beacons could run out of power as soon as this weekend. The HMS Tireless bolsters the capabilities of the multinational team, which has been relying on a combination of satellite images, radar data and crews scanning through aircraft windows to search an area the size of Italy for floating debris.
The nuclear-powered submarine, built for the Royal Navy as a Cold War attack vehicle, has equipment on board that may help it to pinpoint signals from Flight 370’s recorders. It could also be used to search for aircraft wreckage along the largely undisturbed seabed, a spokeswoman for the U.K.’s defense ministry said.
The HMS Tireless will be joined by Ocean Shield, an Australian navy ship that will be towing a U.S. Navy black-box locator. The device is called a Towed Pinger Locator (TPL). It’s a passive listening device that can detect signals up to 2 miles away while operating down to a maximum depth of 20,000 feet.
Eight aircraft and nine ships are participating in the Thursday search. No discoveries have been reported.
Meanwhile, the FBI has completed its investigation of the pilot’s flight-simulator hard drive and concluded that it found nothing suspicious.
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Photo by Aero Icarus released under a Creative Commons Share Alike license.
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