By ZAFIRA ANWAR | news@nst.com.my
KUALA LUMPUR : Five military aircraft continued air search despite poor weather in Perth, today.
Bernama quoted the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) saying that four military aircraft had departed Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Pearce base despite an earlier decision to suspend air search activities for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 on Tuesday.
“They were joined by an RAAF E7 Wedgetail aircraft to support airspace deconfliction that departed from RAAF Base Learmonth,” said JACC in its statement.
Bernama reported that the aircraft would continue their missions with captains assessing the weather conditions and use their discretion as to whether they would continue their planned search activities or return to base.
JACC on Tuesday had earlier said air search activities for the day were suspended due to poor weather conditions in the search area as a result of Tropical Cyclone Jack.
“The heavy seas and poor visibility would make any air search activities ineffective and potentially hazardous.”
“The Australian Maritime Safety Authority has planned a visual search area totaling approximately 49,491 square kilometres. The centre of the search area lies approximately 1584 kilometres north west of Perth.” said JACC.
It said the 10 ships involved in today’s search however continued with their planned activities as usual.
“The Bluefin-21 AUV was currently completing mission nine in the underwater operations and had completed approximately two thirds of the focused underwater search area with no contacts of interest found to date.”
JACC said the focused underwater search area was defined as a circle of 10 kilometres radius around the second Towed Pinger Locator detection which occurred on 8 April.
The Beijing-bound Malaysia Airline flight MH370 disappeared with 239 passengers and crew members on March 8. It was last detected in the southern Indian Ocean.
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