A US Navy official warned Sunday that finding the missing Malaysian jet may be impossible, as efforts to locate the plane intensified ahead of the expected failure of its black-box homing beacons.
“It all depends on how effective we are at reducing that search area,” Capt. Mark Matthews told reporters at Australia’s Stirling Naval Base near Perth.
“Right now, the search area is basically the size of the Indian Ocean, which would take an untenable amount of time to search.”
Matthews — who is in charge of the Navy’s “Towed Pinger Locator” system for finding black boxes — compared the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 to that for Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.
“We had much better positional information of where that aircraft went in the water,” he said.
“We supported with a Towed Pinger Locator search. The pingers were non-functional on that aircraft due to the damage it received when it hit the water.
“It then took over two years conducting side-scan sonar searches with autonomous vehicles to locate the debris. So it can be a very long search effort,” he said.
Hopes that debris from the vanished Boeing 777 had finally been recovered were dashed Sunday when the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said the only things found so far were “fishing equipment and other flotsam.”
But at least four new orange objects a minimum of 6 feet in length were spotted by the crew of an Australian Orion P3 search plane, which dropped a GPS buoy so ships could investigate, Flight Lt. Russell Adams said after returning to base.
Adams said it was “the most visibility we had of any objects in the water and gave us the most promising leads,” but added: “I must stress that we can’t confirm the origin of these objects.”
Nine aircraft and eight ships scoured a targeted area of water about the size of New Mexico as searchers raced the clock to try and find the jumbo jet that disappeared March 8 with 239 people aboard.
The batteries that power the “pingers” inside the plane’s black boxes only have an expected life of 30 days, meaning they’re likely to die during the first week of April.
Meanwhile, outraged relatives of Chinese passengers on the plane flew from Beijing to Malaysia to demand an apology from the Malaysian government and a meeting with Prime Minister Najib Razak.
“Hand us the murderer. Tell us the truth. Give us our relatives back,” read one banner carried by the protesters.
The crowd of about 250 burst into applause when one woman denounced the government-owned Malaysia Airlines as “criminal suspects.”
About two-thirds of the 227 passengers were from China.
With Post Wire Services