AUSTRALIAN Prime Minister Tony Abbott said yesterday failure to find any clue in the most likely crash site of the missing Malaysia Airlines jet would not spell the end of the search.
He said officials planned to soon bring in more powerful sonar equipment that can delve deeper beneath the Indian Ocean.
The search coordination centre said a robotic submarine, the United States Navy’s Bluefin-21, had so far covered more than 80 per cent of the 310sq km seabed search zone off the Australian west coast, creating a three-dimensional sonar map of the ocean floor.
Nothing of interest had been found.
The 4.5km deep search area is a circle 20km wide around an area where sonar equipment picked up a signal on April 8 which was consistent with a plane’s black boxes.
But the batteries powering those signals are now dead.
Defence Minister David Johnston said Australia was consulting with Malaysia, China and the US on the next phase of the search for the plane that went missing on March 8, which is likely to be announced next week.
He also said cost was not a concern in the search.
“There will be some issues of costs into the future but this is not about costs,” Johnston said here.
“We want to find this aircraft. We want to say to our friends in Malaysia and China that this is not about cost. We are concerned to be seen to be helping them in a most tragic circumstance.”
Johnston said more powerful towed side-scan commercial sonar equipment would probably be deployed, similar to the remote-controlled subs that found RMS Titanic 3,800m under the Atlantic Ocean in 1985 and the Australian World War 2 wreck HMAS Sydney in the Indian Ocean off the Australian coast, north of the current search area, in 2008.
“The next phase, I think, is that we step up with potentially a more powerful, more capable side-scan sonar to do deeper water,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Australian prime minister said the airliner’s probable impact zone was a swath of sea floor measuring 700km long and 80km wide.
He said a new search strategy would be adopted if nothing was found in the current seabed search zone.
“If at the end of that period we find nothing, we are not going to abandon the search, we may well rethink the search, but we will not rest until we have done everything we can to solve this mystery.
“We owe it to the families of the 239 people on board.
“We owe it to the hundreds of millions — indeed, billions — of people who travel by air, to try to get to the bottom of this.
“The only way we can get to the bottom of this is to keep searching the probable impact zone until we find something or until we have searched it as thoroughly as human ingenuity allows at this time,” Abbott said.
The focus of next phase of the seafloor search would be decided on by continuing analysis of information including flight data and sound detection of suspected beacons, Johnston said.
“A lot of this seabed has not even been hydrographically surveyed before.
“Some of it has been, but we’re flying blind,” he said, adding that the seabed in the vicinity of the search was up to 7km deep.
The search centre said an air search involving 10 planes was suspended for a second day because of heavy seas and poor visibility. AP
-NST
