Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is Missing

Searchers preparing to resume the underwater hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 increasingly suspect that some of the electronic signals detected last month didn't come from the jetliner's black-box flight recorders, a senior Australian naval officer said.

The doubts—based on further acoustic analysis of the transmissions by Australian authorities over recent weeks—represent another potential setback in the two-month-old operation. An initial underwater search in the southern Indian Ocean has already failed to find any sign of the missing plane, while a costly air-and-ship search of the ocean's surface turned up only garbage.

Authorities in April clung to hope that electronic transmissions picked up by Australian naval vessel ADV Ocean Shield on four occasions on April 5 and April 8 would provide a breakthrough in the search. But authorities are increasingly considering only the two transmissions on April 5 as relevant to the search, Australian naval Commander James Lybrand, captain of the Ocean Shield search vessel, said in an interview late last week. Further analysis of the streams of signals detected three days later on April 8 has led authorities to doubt that they were from a man-made device, Cmdr. Lybrand said.

Each of the transmissions on April 8 were intermittent and at a frequency of around 27 kHz—much lower than the 37.5 kHz frequency that beacons are designed to emit, and also lower than the 33.3 kHz frequency of other transmissions on April 5. "As far as frequency goes, between 33 kHz and 27 kHz is a pretty large jump," Cmdr. Lybrand said.

The Joint Agency Coordination Center, the Australian agency leading the search, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Cmdr. Lybrand's remarks.

Authorities continue to believe that the two April 5 signals—including one held for 2 hours and 20 minutes—are consistent with black-box locator beacons. The signals from that day were detected at a slightly lower frequency than locator beacons are designed to emit, but officials have said this anomaly could have been caused by weakening batteries and the vagaries of deep-sea conditions.

Two other signal streams picked up in the search area had earlier been eliminated as leads, further highlighting the pitfalls of tracking possible noises from locator beacons in the open sea. Signals picked up early in the search by British navy vessel HMS Echo were later shown to have been noises from the ship itself, while a detection from a sonar buoy dropped in the ocean in early April was later determined to have come from a passing commercial freighter.

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AssassinsMace said:

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06:12
Malaysia to publicly release satellite data on missing jetliner
Malaysia will publicly release satellite data used to narrow the search for the missing MH370 jetliner. The Civil Aviation Department and British company Inmarsat on Tuesday said they would do this “in line with our commitment to greater transparency,” AP reported. Some family members of the 239 people on the Malaysia Airlines plane have demanded raw satellite data to be made public for independent analysis. According to the government, calculations using Inmarsat data showed Flight 370 ended in the Indian Ocean after it went missing March 8 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

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delft said:

We waited a long time:

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AssassinsMace said:

The US Navy has concluded that the pings that led to the underwater search were not from MH370. I don't expect the New York Times to print a retraction.

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PanAsian said:

Don't expect the rest of the world to print a retraction either.

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Dutch company to survey ocean in search for MH370
DPA

A Dutch company is to survey the ocean floor where the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is thought to have gone down, Australian authorities said on Tuesday.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau signed a contract in Canberra with Fugro Survey, said the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, the body coordinating the search for the plane.

The survey work will last three months and cover 60,000 square kilometres of sea, it said.

The plane disappeared on March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

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17 June 2014 Last updated at 00:20 GMT

Malaysian MH370: Inmarsat confident on crash 'hotspot'

By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News


The UK satellite company Inmarsat has told the BBC that the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet has yet to go to the area its scientists think is the plane's most likely crash site.

Inmarsat's communications with the aircraft are seen as the best clues to the whereabouts of Flight MH370.

The hunt for the lost jet is currently taking a short break while ships map the Indian Ocean floor.

When the search resumes, the Inmarsat "hotspot" will be a key focus.

But so too will a number of areas being fed into the investigation by other groups.

Australian authorities are expected to announce where these are shortly.

The BBC's Horizon TV programme has been given significant access to the telecommunications experts at Inmarsat.

It was the brief, hourly electronic connections between the jet and one of company's spacecraft that are currently driving the search.

Inmarsat's scientists could tell from the timings and frequencies of the connection signals that the plane had to have come down in the southern Indian Ocean.

An Australian naval vessel was sent to investigate the region west of Perth, and followed up leads as they emerged.

But as Horizon reports, the Ocean Shield ship never got to the Inmarsat hotspot because it picked up sonar detections some distance away that it thought were coming from the jet's submerged flight recorders.

The priority was to investigate these "pings", and two months were spent searching 850 sq km of sea bed. Ultimately, it turned out to be a dead end.

"It was by no means an unrealistic location but it was further to the north east than our area of highest probability," Chris Ashton at Inmarsat tells Horizon.

The company's experts used their data to plot a series of arcs across the Indian Ocean where its systems made contact with the jet.

By modelling a flight with a constant speed and a constant heading consistent with the plane being flown by autopilot - the team found one flight path that lined up with all its data.

"We can identify a path that matches exactly with all those frequency measurements and with the timing measurements and lands on the final arc at a particular location, which then gives us a sort of a hotspot area on the final arc where we believe the most likely area is," said Mr Ashton.

The Australian authorities leading the hunt have now recognised the need to make a high-resolution bathymetric (depth) survey of the wider search zone - some 60,000 sq km in area.

This is likely to take several months, but once they know precisely the shape of the sea bed and the height of the water column, they can then better choose the most appropriate vehicles to continue the underwater sweep.

MH370 was lost on 8 March en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. A total of 239 passengers and crew were on board.

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