Australian officials have resumed the search for the still-missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean, The New York Times has learned.
Using 3D-maps and heavy-duty sonar equipment, Australian Transport Safety Bureau agents will plunge the depths of the ocean off western Australia in search of the plane's debris, the ATSB said Monday.
Flight MH370 is believed to have run out of fuel somewhere in the region several hours after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on March 8. All 239 people onboard presumably died either from loss of oxygen or when the Beijing-bound plane went down.
An initial search included a more than 1 million square mile search area where the plane was thought to have crashed in the Indian Ocean. But after and exhausting 52-day international search, no wreckage from the Boeing 777 was found.
With the new maps, ATSB crews will be able to navigate the layout of underwater volcanoes, trenches, nooks and ravines that are up to four miles deep, The NY Times reported.
"It is rugged underwater terrain, a long way down," Alec Duncan, of the Center for Marine Science and Technology at Curtin University, told the newspaper. "It makes the next phase of the search much harder."
The terrain also slows down the sonar equipment, which is strong enough to pick up deep underwater wreckage. It works best when towed at a level of 650 feet from the seabed, "and it may be towed on cable six miles long out the back of a vessel," Duncan said. "You can't be flying blind using that sort of equipment. That's where the detailed maps come in."
Authorities believe Flight 370's transponder was deliberately turned off between 1 and 2 a.m. when it vanished somewhere between Malaysia and Vietnam and veered off its course towards the Indian Ocean. A promising lead came in May when a series of "pings" detected underwater were thought to be from the plane's black box, CNN reported. But the pings turned out to be false.
At one point, Australian Defense Force Vice Chief Mark Binskin compared the search to looking for a needle in a haystack without knowing where the haystack is.
"What we'd say is we've probably limited it to a small number of haystacks, and we have very good techniques for detecting needles in those haystacks," Martin Dolan, CEO of the ATSB, told CNN. "We have high confidence that if we've got the right haystack, we'll find the needle in it."
