MH370 - Authorities insist plane 'will be found along search arc' as private search firm hired

Australian authorities insist missing Malaysia Airlines plane MH370 will be found along "seventh arc" search area as private Dutch firm contracted to map Indian Ocean floor to 20,000 feet.

Authorities remain confident they will find the Boeing 777 Photo: AP

By Jonathan Pearlman, Sydney 1:00PM BST 10 Jun 2014

Authorities in Australia searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane have hired a Dutch private company to start mapping the ocean floor at depths of up to 20,000 feet but continued to insist the aircraft “will be found along the seventh arc”.

Fugro Survey, a deep water survey company, is the first private contractor to be hired as the search enters its next phase and begins hunting underwater across an expanded zone covering 24,000 square miles.

“The bathymetric survey will provide a map of the underwater search zone, charting the contours, depths and composition of the sea floor in water depths up to 6,000 metres [19,700 feet],” the Joint Agency Coordination Centre said in a statement.

“The survey will provide crucial information to help plan the deep water search for MH370 which is scheduled to commence in August.

A vessel equipped with a deep-water multi-beam echo sounder system, MV Fugro Equator, will join the Chinese navy vessel Zhu Kezhen on a mapping operation that is due to take three months.

Australian authorities have hired Furgo to conduct the survey but it remains unclear which nations will cover the soaring costs for the increasingly expansive search.

“We’re still to negotiate the burden-sharing with, for example, Malaysia,” the head of the JACC, Angus Houston told ABC News.

Australia has budgeted £50 million for the search over the next two years but China and Malaysia are also helping to contribute. The bulk of the 239 passengers on the plane were Chinese.

Authorities remain confident they will find the Boeing 777 even though it went missing more than three months ago and no wreckage has been found.

Asked about his comments two months ago that authorities were on the verge of finding the plane, Mr Houston, a retired defence chief, said he had “tried to be realistic”.

“I’ve been guarded in optimism,” he said. “Certainly when we picked up those four acoustic transmissions I guess our hope went up and again, I was very guarded about that ... I said we can’t confirm that there’s anything down there until such time as we find something on the bottom.”

Mr Houston said he remained confident the plane would be found along an arc in the Indian Ocean based on a series of satellite handshakes detected by British firm Inmarsat.

The seventh arc charts the likely direction of the plane based on its seventh and final satellite ‘handshake’, at which point the aircraft is believed to have been out of fuel and descending.

“I’ve always said that that seventh handshake arc is the most robust data that we have. The aircraft will be found somewhere along that arc.”

Siurce: http://www.telegraph.co.uk