An underwater search has been launched to detect the signal from the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370’s black box.

Aircraft will continue to search for the Boeing 777-200ER while Australian Navy ship, Ocean Shield and the British Royal Navy’s HMS Echo will converge along a 240km track in the southern Indian Ocean.

“Using the Towed Pinger Locator (TPL) from the United States Navy on Australian Defence Vessel Ocean Shield and a similar capability on HMS Echo, the two ships will search a single 240km track, converging on each other,” said Joint Agencies Coordination Centre (JACC) chief coordinator, Australian Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston.

Joint Task Force 658 Commander, Commodore Peter Leavy added that the two ships and their towed-pinger equipment would be operating at significantly reduced speed to search depths of in excess of 3,000 metres. “While the preference for search operations is to use physical evidence and then drift modelling to determine a smaller sub-surface search area, the search track is considered to be the best estimate possible for an area likely to contain the…aircraft,” he said, adding that the equipment can only operate effectively at reduced speed, around three knots.

Flight 370, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew, left Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12.41am on March 8 and disappeared from radar about an hour later, while over the South China Sea.

A multinational search was mounted for the aircraft, first in the South China Sea and then, after it was learned that the aircraft had veered off course, along two corridors – the northern corridor stretching from the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to northern Thailand, and the southern corridor, from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean.

Following an unprecedented type of analysis of satellite data, the British satellite company Inmarsat and the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) concluded that Flight 370 flew along the southern corridor and that its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth, Australia.

Malaysian authorities announced on March 24 – 17 days after the disappearance of the Boeing 777-200ER aircraft, that Flight 370 had ended in the southern Indian Ocean.

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