Hunt for Jet’s Black Box Is a Race Against Time
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — With only days left before the batteries on the data and voice recorders of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 were set to die, the multinational search force resumed its hunt at daybreak Thursday with eight aircraft and nine ships sweeping a patch of the Indian Ocean about 1,050 miles west of Perth, Australia, and a British nuclear submarine preparing to join the hunt.
In the three-and-a-half weeks since the plane disappeared, the search — which has shifted its focus from the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand to the Strait of Malacca and, most recently, the southern Indian Ocean — has turned up no evidence of the Boeing 777-200.
The authorities want to get their hands on the plane’s recorders — or black boxes — hoping they might reveal the reason why the airliner suddenly veered from its scheduled flight path between Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Beijing early on March 8 and instead flew south over the Indian Ocean where officials believe it crashed.
The black boxes emit pings that help searchers locate them, but those signals will stop sometime next week when the devices’ batteries are scheduled to die. At that point, the boxes will lie mute on the deep seabed, making their recovery far more difficult. While the retrieval of debris might help locate wreckage, experts advise that any floating items could have drifted perhaps hundreds of miles from the plane’s point of impact, diminishing their utility in the search.
Tracking Flight 370
The sequence of events known by the authorities, in local times.
If no debris is found, officials and experts warn, the plane may not be found for years, if ever. Investigators took nearly two years to find the black boxes of Air France Flight 447 after it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, even though it was traveling along a known path, and debris was recovered within several days.
On Thursday, one of the search planes will drop marker buoys to track the ocean currents and their effect on possible debris. After a couple of days of rough weather and high seas, the forecast for Thursday was better, with visibility of about 12 miles, though some isolated showers were anticipated in the southern area of the search zone, said the Australian authorities coordinating the effort.
A British submarine, the HMS Tireless, was scheduled to join the hunt, though it was unclear when its mission would begin. It is outfitted with listening equipment that can help track the pings of the black boxes.
Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia was in Western Australia on Thursday, the second day of a two-day visit to meet with his Australian counterpart, Prime Minister Tony Abbott, and view operations at Pearce Air Force Base.
“This has been a remarkable effort, bringing together nations from around the world,” he said in a statement released by his office. “The disappearance of MH370 has tested our collective resolve.”
Officials overseeing the search have increasingly sought to tamp down expectations that the plane might be located soon.
The Search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
Australia announced on Friday that it had moved the search area nearly 700 miles to the northeast of an area it had been searching for about a week.FULL GRAPHIC »
Possible
flight paths
(based on different
speeds the plane may
have been traveling)
Search areas
March 28-30
5,000 FT.
AUSTRALIA
10,000 FT.
547
m.p.h.
540
m.p.h.
460
m.p.h.
Perth
About 1,100 miles
10,000 FT.
Planned search
area for March 31
10,000 FT.
Search areas
March 19-27
10,000 FT.
INDIAN OCEAN
WATER
DEPTH
15,000 FT.
Locations of objects spotted in aerial and
satellite images over the last two weeks
Earlier this week, in his first press briefing since taking over coordination of the search operations, Angus Houston, Australia’s former chief of the Australian Defense Force, cautioned against a quick resolution.
“The recovery operation is probably the most challenging one that I have ever seen,” he said. “It isn’t something that is necessarily going to be resolved in the next two weeks.”
Still, the Malaysian government has been under considerable pressure to produce solid clues about the plane’s whereabouts and the fate of the people on board.
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Malaysian officials have suffered particularly sharp criticism from the Chinese. Relatives of Chinese passengers, who made up the majority of the people on the flight, have accused the Malaysian government of lies and a coverup, while Chinese officials have demanded greater transparency from the Malaysians in their handling of the investigation.
The Malaysian authorities have held several closed-door briefings with Chinese relatives in Beijing and Kuala Lumpur to update them on the progress of the search. And last week, Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia’s defense minister and acting transport minister, even appealed to the Chinese government for collaboration, “to engage and clarify the actual situation to the affected families in particular and the Chinese public in general.”
This week, China, which has contributed eight ships and two planes to the search, publicly pressured the Malaysian and Australian authorities to keep up the search despite its lack of results so far.
On Wednesday, the Prime Minister of China, Li Keqiang, called Mr. Abbott and insisted that the search for Flight 370 remain vigorous, according to Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency.
“Although at present the search effort faces even more complicated circumstances and difficulties, it cannot slacken, and even less can it be abandoned,” Mr. Li said.
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