Malaysia Flight 370: 'We're throwing everything at this difficult, complex task'
The pulses that an Australian navy ship detected over the weekend from a remote location in the Indian Ocean have not been picked up since, but authorities are not letting that deter their search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
"We have at least several days of intense actions ahead of us," Australian Defense Minister David Johnston told reporters Tuesday. "We're throwing everything at this difficult, complex task."Investigators hope the signals were from locator beacons that were attached to the data and voice recorders that were stored in the tail of the Boeing 777-200ER when it disappeared from radar screens on March 8.Buoyed by the hope that they're closing in on the beacons, they reduced the search area Tuesday.
Their current focus is 30,000 square miles (more than 77,500 square kilometers) of the Indian Ocean, about 1,400 miles (2,250 kilometers) northwest of Perth. That's about a third of the size of the previous search zone.
"Instead of looking at an area the size of Texas, we're now looking in an area the size of Houston," aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas told CNN.Time, however, is looming as a factor.The batteries powering the beacons, which are designed to emit signals when submerged in salt water, are certified to last 30 days.Tuesday marks day 32.
Experts have said the batteries could last longer if they were fully charged when the plane disappeared while carrying 239 people on a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing."We need to continue ... for several days right up to when the point at which there's absolutely no doubt that the pinger batteries will have expired," said retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, the chief of the Australian agency coordinating the search.
Retired Royal Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Kay predicted the search for the pingers would continue for another week and a half."We know that the batteries can last up to 40 days," Kay told CNN. "If I was Angus Houston, I would be putting the search out to at least 42, 43 (days) to make absolutely sure that the batteries had failed."The race against time is the "Number one challenge" searchers face, U.S. Navy Cmdr. William Marks told CNN.
"We haven't quit since we initially heard these signals," he said. "We've been going continuously around the clock and we haven't been able to reacquire them."Searchers are still scouring the waters, but their optimism is "more cautious" now, he said. "As hours pass," he said, "our optimism is fading away, ever so slightly."