By Daniel Stacey
Australian authorities said a new search area for Malaysia
Airlines Flight 370 will be decided by the end of June, giving
private contractors seeking a role in the rebooted operation little
time to adjust bids before an official tender closes.
Australia's Joint Agency Coordination Centre said new analysis
of ping transmissions between the missing plane and an Inmarsat PLC
satellite had made it clear that "the search zone will move."
Although authorities are yet to fix on a precise spot, any new
location will remain in the southern Indian Ocean along an arc
based on the Boeing Co. 777 jet's final ping transmission on March
8.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that the search area
may move hundreds of miles southwest after analysts looking at the
Inmarsat ping signals decided the plane may have traveled faster
than previously thought and turned south later.
The shift in the search area would be the latest blow for
families of the 239 passengers and crew on board Flight 370, still
waiting for answers about the fate of the plane some 100 days after
it went missing. Extensive air and sea searches have turned up only
garbage, while an initial underwater search failed to find any
trace of the jetliner.
The lack of a fixed search area poses questions about the
usefulness of expensive deep-sea survey vessels deployed in the
remote Indian Ocean. A Chinese navy ship, Zhu Kezhen, has surveyed
4,088 square kilometers (1,578 square miles) of the seabed in
recent weeks, hoping to lay the groundwork for more detailed
searches with undersea sonar devices. It is unclear if those ocean
floor maps would be useful if the search area moves.
The Fugro Equator, a commercial survey vessel owned by Dutch
company Fugro NV, also began mapping the seabed this week. A Fugro
representative in Perth, Western Australia, said earlier its
vessels cost between 75,000 Australian dollars (US$70,000) and
A$160,000 a day to rent.
JACC didn't return a request for comment on the location of the
two survey vessels.
Survey costs will be met from the A$60 million set aside by
Australia and its partners to look for the missing plane. That
means any cost overruns will eat into remaining capital to scour
the seabed with deep-sea sonar equipment, or recover debris with
remotely operated vehicles.
Part of the delay in deciding the final search area relates to
the arduous analysis being carried out by officials of "burst
frequency offset" data collected by Inmarsat.
A person close the investigation previously told The Wall Street
Journal that this data set--comprising the frequency of seven ping
signals picked up by Inmarsat's satellite while Flight 370 was in
the air--is being tested to see how it matches a wide range of
aircraft speeds, aircraft directions and fuel-consumption
numbers.
Doppler analysis allows officials to determine possible air
speeds and bearings for the plane at each ping, but not a
definitive speed or bearing. Different combinations are run through
all seven pings to see how they match up, and tested against
aircraft performance models that can show how long the plane could
keep flying at different speeds given its known fuel load.
But the process is lengthy and iterative, producing only areas
of high and low probability for where the plane may have crashed,
rather than firm answers.
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