Search vessels has reached its designated site in the southern Indian Ocean to join the deep sea search and solve the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
The Fugro Discovery has arrived at Fremantle Port in Western Australia, where the aircraft is believed to have crashed with 239 people on board.
Crews are preparing to resume the sonar searches of the sea floor, more than 1,500 kilometres off the Western Australian coast on Monday with high-tech equipment and video cameras.
Experts believe the plane crashed somewhere in the area after veering off course from it's Kuala Lumpur to Beijing flight on 8 March.
A three-dimensional model of the sea floor terrain, derived from satellite gravity measurements and some from ocean passage soundings |
The Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre says the vessel will conduct operations in the area for about 12 days before sailing to Fremantle to be resupplied.
Fugro Equator, which is surveying the search area, is likely to be used as a search vessel when its bathymetric work finishes later this month.
More than 111,000 square kilometres of the search area has been analysed and mapped so far.
A massive land and sea search has failed to find any trace of the plane.
GO Phoenix, the first of the vessels contracted to conduct the underwater search, departed Jakarta, Indonesia more than a week ago, after work was done to prepare the ship for the sea and weather conditions it would encounter.
Chief commissioner from the ATSB Martin Dolan says the vessel is likely to arrive late Sunday.
'When they get going, they will deploy an underwater sonar in on the end of very long cable, eight kilometres, they will tow that sonar in on a toefish, which contains sonar equipoment, close to ocean floor, 100 metres,' he said.
'They send out sonar signals, get them back, a width of about 1.5 kms, that will go up the cable to vessel and crews to look and anaylise for anything for interest.'
'It will be recorded and transferred in batches, re-anaylised so nothing to be missed.'
The new stage of the search comes after months of detailed analysis and sea bed surveys, which has indicated the aircraft should be found along a defined arc in the southern Indian Ocean, where it's believed to have run out of fuel.
The primary search area - dubbed the 'priority area' - is an arc 23,000 square miles (60,000 square kilometres) in size, roughly the size of Croatia, 1,120 miles (1,800km) off the Australian coast.
'Three things that make it complicated is that we know aircraft will be found there but have to prioritise high probability areas,' said Chief Dolan.
'Also towing expensive equipment, we need to know closely what the ocean floor is like, the sea floor is quite complex, not just a simple matter, additional attention is needed for some areas to cover them properly.'
'Lastly data itself requires a specialised eye to understand, so we also have the capacity to review.'
bathymetric survey image shows that the depth of the sea floor in one area of the search site |
'Weather is improving and the course of this month is as good as it gets, make the searching as easy as possible but still big swells, storm will come through.'
Vessels will also be joining GO Phoenix including Furgo Discovery which has completed fit out works in Durban, South Africa and is en-route to Australia where it is expected to arrive in Fremantle on Sunday.
Furgo Equator, the vessel currently being used to survey the search area, is expected to be mobilised as a search vessel when its bathymetric work is complete around the end of October.
'The second vessel, Furgo will be there about the end of the third week of this month, the Equator in Perth by the end of the month to do its first underwater search.
'It's not clear how long that search will take,' Transport Minister Warren Truss said, according to the ABC. `We would hope, obviously, to find the aircraft on the first day, but it could in fact take a year to search the entire area and weather conditions will have an impact.'
The chief commissioner said there are several 'high probability' areas located that will be searched in the southern arc of the Indian Ocean.
'The second vessel will go to another high probability area and the third vessel will work between those two areas,' he said.
'Until we have more solid data in flight data by boxes no one will be able to come to form a view, people will speculate.'
'We want to givce some certainty of closure to families. The current plan is scheduled to take up to a year but we hope we won't need that.'
'There are no guarantees.'
The search operation is a joint effort by Australia and Malaysia costing $57 million.
There has been many theories as to what happened to the Malaysian airlines flight MH370 but there's been increased interest on the pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah who reportedly used a flight simulator at his home to plot a path to a remote island.
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