GENERAL NEWS

Submersible’s First Scan for Jet Wreckage Is Cut Short

15/04/2014

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The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has moved to the dark depths of the Indian Ocean with the first deployment of an unmanned submersible to scan the seabed for signs of wreckage, officials said Tuesday.

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But the inaugural mission of the torpedo-shaped submarine, a Bluefin-21, was cut short because it reached its maximum operating depth of about 2.8 miles, triggering a safety mechanism that forced it back to the surface, the Australian agency coordinating the search said.

The data the vehicle captured during its abbreviated mission, which occurred late Monday, yielded “no objects of interest,” according to a statement from the United States Navy’s Seventh Fleet, which is overseeing American naval involvement in the search.

Officials said they planned to send the Bluefin back down on Tuesday if weather permitted; the forecast was for scattered showers and isolated thunderstorms with sea swells up to six feet. There was no immediate word, however, on whether the authorities planned to supplement the Bluefin with another submarine.

The deployment of the Bluefin marked the start of a new phase in the search, shifting the emphasis to the sea bottom.

The Bluefin, which is equipped with sonar mapping technology, was deployed in the area where four sets of pings were detected during the past two weeks by American technicians working aboard an Australian naval vessel, Ocean Shield.

The vehicle was expected to spend about 20 hours in the water — two hours to descend to the seabed, 16 hours of exploring and another two hours to ascend. But after six hours, the submersible exceeded its depth limit, officials said.

In the meantime, planes and vessels continued to scour the ocean surface in hopes of finding debris from the plane. Despite weeks of searching, no debris from the aircraft has been recovered.

Up to nine military aircraft, two civil aircraft and 11 ships were scheduled to assist in Tuesday’s search. The aircraft and most of the search vessels were being deployed to areas where debris is likely to have drifted, hundreds of miles from where the underwater pings were detected.

The decision to deploy the Bluefin, and to shift the focus of the search to the seabed, was announced on Monday.

An American team aboard Ocean Shield had been using an underwater listening device, called a towed pinger locator, to trawl for signals from the plane’s flight recorders, commonly known as black boxes.

They detected two sets of signals on April 5 and two more on …