Missing plane search enters ‘yet another phase’

The search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane has entered “yet another phase” as officials search the deep waters of the southern Indian Ocean for the jetliner that vanished over a month, officials said Tuesday.

Malaysia’s Acting Minister of Transport Hishammuddin Hussein said in a news conference that officials were continuing to look for remnants of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, despite the fact that it has been almost five weeks since the jet was last seen by air traffic controllers.

“It has been 39 days since MH370 went missing,” Hishammuddin said. “We have now entered a new phase for the search operations expanding into deep ocean search with deployment of the Bluefin – 21 Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AVU). As stated by the Joint Agency Coordinating Center in Perth earlier today, there are 9 military aircraft, 2 civil aircrafts and 11 ships which haven assigned to search for MH370.”

{mosads}The search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight has been a multi-national effort that has frustrated aviation officials in the U.S. and internationally.

The airplane, which was carrying 239 passengers, was last detected by air traffic controllers on March 8, when it was about an hour into its flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing, China.

Investigators initially believed the plane had crashed in the Gulf of Thailand, where it was scheduled to be flying over at the point in its flight path that it disappeared from radar detection.

The search later moved to the Indian Ocean after officials from multiple nations began finding pictures of debris in satellite images they believed were related to the missing plane.

The satellite leads have turned up empty so far as countries have sent ships to the area of the Indian Ocean near Australia where the images were captured.

Hishammuddin said Tuesday that the choppy waters of the Indian Ocean was still the focus of the investigation.

“The search area is based on the identified location where the ping transmission was last detected and verified to be from an electronic device,” he said. “The Bluefin-21 which will be deployed daily to locate the black box, will take 24 hours to complete a full mission. It takes 2 hours for it to descend to the bottom level, 16 hours to search and photograph the seabed, 2 hours to ascend back to the surface and 4 hours to download the images.”

Hishammuddin added that investigators had new reasons to be optimistic that they might be getting close to finding the missing airplane.

“I would like to conclude by reiterating that the search for the MH370 has entered yet another phase,” he said. “The information release yesterday has provided new leads, and given new direction to the search process. When possible, we will keep the media fully briefed, but our priority remains with the search operations.”