MH370: Australia plans to use system that found Titanic

Perth, April 23: Australia is mulling deploying a more powerful system that tracked the Titanic 29 years ago to locate the wreckage of the crashed Malaysian airliner as a robotic mini-submarine scouring the Indian Ocean seabed has not achieved any breakthrough in its underwater mission.

Australia was also consulting Malaysia, China and the US on the next phase of the search for the plane, that mysteriously disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board, including five Indians.

More powerful towed side-scan commercial sonar equipment would probably be deployed, similar to the system that found the Titanic 3,800 m under the Atlantic Ocean in 1985 and the Australian second world war wreck HMAS Sydney in the Indian Ocean, north of the current search area, in 2008, the Associated Press quoted Australia's defence minister David Johnston as saying.

"The next phase, I think, is that we step up with potentially a more powerful, more capable side-scan sonar to do deeper water," he said.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the plane's probable impact zone was a swath of sea floor 700 kms long and 80 kms wide. He told reporters that a new search strategy would be adopted if nothing was found in the current search zone.

"If at the end of that period we find nothing, we are not going to abandon the search, we may well rethink the search, but we will not rest until we have done everything we can to solve this mystery," Abbott said.

Up to 10 military aircraft and 12 ships will assist in today's search for the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, a day after planned air search activities were suspended due to poor weather conditions in the search area due to Tropical Cyclone Jack.

Autonomous underwater vehicle Bluefin-21, a US Navy probe equipped with side-scan sonar, "has now completed more than 80 per cent of the focused underwater search area," Perth-based Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) said in a statement.

"No contacts of interest have been found to date," it said on the 47th day of the search for the ill-fated Beijing- bound plane, that veered off from its course after take-off from Kuala Lumpur.

"Bluefin-21 AUV is currently completing mission ten in the underwater search area," the statement said. The min-submarine has focused the search on an area where four acoustic signals were detected, leading authorities to believe that the Boeing 777-200's black box may be located there.

The AUV had less than one-fifth of the search area left to complete but that could take another two weeks, Johnston said, adding: "We want to be very thorough."

PTI