CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — The next phase of the
underwater search for the missing Malaysian passenger jet will focus on
an area of the Indian Ocean hundreds of kilometers (miles) south of the
first suspected crash site, a senior investigator said Friday.
Martin
Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau,
said an announcement will be made next week on where a 60,000 square
kilometer (23,000 square mile) search of the ocean floor for wreckage
using powerful sonar equipment will be focused.
Dolan said he
expected the probable crash site would be hundreds of kilometers (miles)
south of where a remote-controlled underwater drone scoured 850 square
kilometers (330 square miles) of seabed in the first fruitless search
that ended last month. That search area was defined by acoustic signals
suspected to have come from the missing plane’s black boxes, which
promised to be the best clue to finding Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
But those signals are now widely thought to have come from some other
source.
The new search area will not be based on new data, but on
refined analysis of existing satellite information from the doomed
Boeing 777 after it veered off course during a flight from Kuala Lumpur
to Beijing on March 8.
"All the trends of this analysis will move
the search area south of where it was," Dolan said. "Just how much south
is something that we’re still working on."
"There was a very
complex analysis and there were several different ways of looking at it.
Specialists have used several different methodologies and bringing all
of that work together to get a consensus view is what we’re finalizing
at the moment," he said.
Private contractors are expected to start
the new search far off the west Australian coast in August using
powerful side-scan sonar equipment capable of probing ocean depths of 7
kilometers (4.3 miles). The job is expected to take up to 12 months to
complete.
Two survey ships are currently mapping uncharted expanses of seabed in the search zone before the sonar
scanning starts.
The
search area is in the vast expanse of ocean that was thoroughly swept
for floating debris by search aircraft in the weeks after the plane
disappeared with 239 passengers and crew aboard. No trace of plane has
been found.
Dolan said the new search area will not be as far
southwest of the coastal city of Perth as the initial air search had
focused, near the limit of planes’ range and in storm-prone seas.