BALTIMORE, Maryland April 15, 2014 - The unmanned submarine that the international search team is counting on to actually find the missing Malaysian Airlines Jet that went missing March 8 with 239 people on board automatically aborted its first dive from its current mother ship after on-board sensors detected that it had gone deeper than its maximum safe depth of 4500 meters. The first dive lasted six hours and apparently gathered at least some useful data, but the search team must download and analyze that data before finding out exactly what was learned. A second dive for the submersible vehicle is planned for as soon as conditions permit.
The HMS Ocean Shield, an Australian Navy vessel, is the ship that deploys the sub, known as the Bluefin-21. The Ocean Shield is ensconced within a zone mapped out using pings from what are believed to be the black boxes on the missing plane. The pings were monitored on several occassions over a several week period before the batteries powering the black boxes apparently gave out. Those batteries are supposed to last at least 30 days, and, in fact, pings were picked up by surface vessels and even an airplane, for more than 30 days before they came to a complete stop about one week ago. Before they stopped, searchers were able to map out what they call a "manageable area" where the missing jet might be. The respected Aviation Blog known as "Plane Talking" said today that the benefit of the first six hour sub dive will be, at a minimum, to "tell the Joint Agency Coordination Centre which is managing the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 how well the instruments and systems on board worked, and give it the first on site test of its download and analysis procedures." Anything else picked up by the sub will be a bonus.
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