MH 370: Technical snag in search ops, Sonar detector lost

Kuala Lumpur, Jan 25: The mystery of the missing MH370 flight seems never to be solved as the search operation meets many obstacles. This time, it has lost a deep-water sonar detector that was being used to scour a patch of the ocean floor where the plane is believed to have gone down 2 years ago.

One of the biggest aviation mysteries, the Malaysian Airline flight MH 370 disappeared with 239 people onboard during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014. The only hope was regained when a part of the plane got washed off French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean in July 2015, but there was no trace of the plane thereafter.

The towfish that was focussed on a 120,000-sq-km band of sea floor in the remote southern Indian Ocean hit a mountain and got disconnected from the 4,500 cable that linked it to the ship. Incidentally, the towfish jad collided with mud volcano which rises 2,200 metres from the seafloor.

The towfish scours around 100 meters above the sea level to create a flattened image of it. Earlier in January, the JACC said that it would complete scouring the seabed in the end of June, ruling out any possibility of extending the search operation.

OneIndia News