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The so-called Towed Pinger Locator will be crucial in finding the black box of the missing jetliner if a debris field is established by an Australian-led international search team scouring an area in the southern Indian Ocean some 2,500 km (1,550 miles) southwest of Perth.
“If debris is found we will be able to respond as quickly as possible since the battery life of the black box’s pinger is limited,” Commander Chris Budde, US Seventh Fleet Operations Officer, said in an emailed statement.
Attention and resources in the search for the Boeing 777 have shifted in recent days from an initial focus north of the equator to an increasingly narrowed stretch of icy sea in the southern Indian Ocean.
Chinese and Japanese military aircraft were joining a 10-strong international fleet of planes scouring the area for the first time on Monday.
A flotilla of Chinese ships, including the icebreaker Xuelong, or Snow Dragon, is also making its way south.
Budde stressed that bringing in the black box detector, which is towed behind a vessel at slow speeds and can pick up “pings” from a black box to a maximum depth of 20,000 feet, was a precautionary measure.
Similarly, Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss stressed the challenges of the search.
“It’s a lot of water to look for just perhaps a tiny object,” Truss told Australian Broadcasting Corp. Radio.
“Today we expect the weather to deteriorate and the forecast ahead is not that good, so it’s going to be a challenge, but we will stick at it,” he said.
Two Chinese military Ilyushin IL-76 aircraft, two Australian P3 Orions and two ultra-long range civilian jets were in the early search party on Monday. Another ultra-long range jet, a US Navy P8 Poseidon and two Japanese P3 Orions were due to depart later in the day.
Floating objects
Australia was analysing French radar images showing potential floating debris that were taken some 850 kms (530 miles) north of the current search area.
“We only recently got this information and we are still examining it,” an AMSA spokeswoman told Reuters by telephone. Malaysia said it received the images on Sunday and passed them on to Australia.
“We are taking it into account but at this stage we are still focused on the same search area,” the spokeswoman said, contradicting earlier comments from Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss that the search area had been expanded north to take into account the French sighting.
Australia has used a US satellite image of two floating objects to frame its search area.
The search planes are zeroing in on the areas around where the earlier sightings were made in an effort to find the object identified by China and other small debris, including a wooden pallet, spotted by a search plane on Saturday.
China said the object it had seen on the satellite image was 22 metres long (74ft) and 13 metres (43ft) wide.
It could not be determined easily from the blurred images whether the objects were the same as those detected by Australia, but the Chinese photograph could depict a cluster of smaller objects, said a senior military officer from one of the 26 nations involved in the search.
The wing of a Boeing 777-200ER is approximately 27 metres long and 14 metres wide at its base, according to estimates derived from publicly available scale drawings. Its fuselage is 63.7 metres long by 6.2 metres wide.
NASA said it would use high-resolution cameras aboard satellites and the International Space Station to look for possible crash sites in the Indian Ocean. The US space agency is also examining archived images collected by instruments on its Terra and Aqua environmental satellites, said NASA spokesman Allard Beutel.
“Our satellites and space-based cameras are designed for long-term scientific data gathering and Earth observation. They’re really not meant to look for a missing aircraft, and obviously NASA isn’t a lead agency in this effort. But we’re trying to support the search, if possible,” Beutel said.
Truss said the aircraft flying on Monday would be focused on searching by sight, rather than radar, which can be tricky to use because of the high seas and wind in the area. Civilian aircraft, which can carry more people, have joined the search.
