THURSDAY, MAR 27, 2014 09:45 AM EDT
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 update: The race to find the black box
Search teams have a finite amount of time to find the black box and solve what happened to the missing flight
TOPICS: MALAYSIA AIRLINES FLIGHT MH370, BLACK BOX, INTERNATIONAL. MISSING PLANE, SEARCH, INDIAN OCEAN, INNOVATION NEWS, NEWS
A U.S Navy black box detector and a Bluefin-21 underwater drone have arrived in Perth, Australia, to help in the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which disappeared on March 8 after abruptly veering off of its scheduled course to Beijing. On Monday, March 24, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced in a televised press conference that according to data from British satellite company Inmarsat, the missing flight had “ended” in the Indian Ocean.
Satellite images taken by France’s Airbus Defense and Space on Sunday were released yesterday and described by the acting minister of transport, Hishammuddin Hussein, as the “most credible” evidence yet. The images show 122 objects in what is being described as a possible “debris” field. The images are also located near previously spotted images by Australian and Chinese satellites. According to the Guardian, the debris field captured by the French satellite is around 400 square kilometers or approximately 150 square miles. The search zone in its entirety is 30,000 square miles.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority, in a release yesterday, said that the search area would be split into eastern and western zones, each with six planes and a ship. However, the Guardian is now reporting that there are only 11 planes taking part in the search. Planes from Australia, the United States, China, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea are involved in the search. China has also sent several ships to the area including an icebreaker that had been docked in Perth post-Antarctic mission.
On top of combing the ocean for physical evidence of where the plane might have gone down, the search team is also looking for what is described as “acoustic pings” emanating from the plane’s black box. The plane’s black box has a cockpit voice recorder and also a data recorder; beacons for each of these recording devices will go off once the black box makes contact with water. The beacons will let off a signal every second — but only for 30 days. This means that the search team has until April 7.
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