MH370: Search crew in race against time to find missing plane

MH370: Search crew in race against time to find missing plane
MH370: Search crew in race against time to find missing plane


After 42 days at sea the Fugro Equator is back in port in Perth.

The waters there are calm but out in the search area where they are looking for the missing MH370 plane, they are anything but - the waves are huge and the weather is wild.

See also: MH370: Plane debris found in Mozambique

See also: MH370: Search vessel sinks after crashing into underwater volcano


The specialist ship had to sail for six days just to reach the search area. It was supposed to search for 30 days before spending six days sailing back but it was too wild to do any active searching on this latest trip. Instead the ship waited for the weather to clear, but it never did.

Paul Caswell, the Fugro Equator part chief, said:"It feels like I've just been couped up inside this whole trip, like a prison except without the one hour of exercise you're allowed!"

The departing crew now have a few weeks on shore. They are multi-national and will scatter around the world.

The search, with three ships at sea for more than two years, has been methodical and high tech.

First, a sonar passed to map the overall shape of the seabed, ocean surveyor Kate Downes said. "The main water depth is around 4,000 metres and there's mountains, volcanoes, trenches, there's everything."

Once the general sea bed has been mapped the crew deploy a machine hooked on to the end of a very long cable to take a closer look.

When the weather allows it, the crew winches it out and tows it between seven and nine kilometres behind the boat and between three and four kilometres deep.

The search area, where experts believe the plane crashed, is 120,000 square kilometres of open ocean - an area bigger than Portugal.

With all of that complete and no sign of the missing plane, there is an inevitable sense of disappointment.

Fugro Equator surveyor Paul Roberts, said: "For the last two years everyone's thought that today's going to be the day that we'll turn up and we're going to find it and it'll be tough, I think, for the guys if we don't find it."

There's still hope that the aircraft will be found before the search area is exhausted.

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