Two ships begin targeted hunt for Malaysia plane black box

Search teams looking for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet have begun a targeted underwater hunt for the aircraft’s black boxes along a stretch of the Indian Ocean.

The new search operation was launched on Friday as the Australian Navy ship Ocean Shield, which is dragging a towed pinger locator from the US Navy, and the British Navy’s HMS Echo converged along a 240-kilometer (150-mile) track in a deserted patch of the southern Indian Ocean.

The missing plane’s data recorders produce a ping that can be detected by the equipment on board the vessels. However, the battery-powered devices stop sending the pings about 30 days after a crash. This means that just a few days have been left before batteries on Flight 370’s black boxes run out.

According to Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency coordinating the search, the ships chose to explore the area on the basis of hourly satellite pings the plane transmitted after it disappeared from radar March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

That information, which has been combined with data on the estimated speed and performance of the Boeing 777, led them to that particular stretch of ocean.

“The area of highest probability as to where the aircraft might have entered the water is the area where the underwater search will commence,” Houston said, adding, “It’s on the basis of data that only arrived very recently and it’s the best data that is available.”

Fourteen planes as well as nine ships are participating in Friday’s search across a 217,000 square kilometer (84,000 square mile) expanse of the ocean, about 1,700 kilometers (1,100 miles) northwest of Perth.

Air crews and ships have been looking for weeks for the missing jet, but have so far failed to find any trace of it.