Sub Deployed in Flight 370 Search Forced to Resurface Early
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U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Peter D. Blair/Released(PERTH, Australia) — The underwater search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was temporarily interrupted on Wednesday.
The U.S. Navy’s Bluefin-21, the robotic submarine searching the southern Indian Ocean for the missing Boeing 777, had to resurface Wednesday morning to fix a technical issue, Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Center said in a statement.
The JACC, which is leading the search for the jetliner, said an intial analysis of the data downloaded from the sub while it was on deck showed no significant detections.
The Bluefin-21 has since been redeployed and is continuing the slow process of creating a sonar map of the area to chart any debris on the sea floor. Each mission takes the sub a total of 24 hours to complete: two hours to reach the bottom of the ocean, 16 hours to execute its search, two hours to return to the surface, and four hours to download and analyze the data it collected.
Officials are hoping to find Flight 370’s black boxes in order to understand what happened to the plane when it disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board.
So far, crews have detected four signals consistent with the pings of an airplane’s black box, which has a battery life of about a month.
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