A Chinese ship equipped with advanced sonar equipment is soon to join the search for the Malaysian airliner believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean almost two years ago, an official said yesterday.
The Dong Hai Jiu 101 is to depart Singapore tomorrow to join the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 over a 120,000km2 expanse of deep seabed by late next month, Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said.
The ship is equipped with a state-of-the-art synthetic aperture sonar (SAS), which some experts say is more accurate than standard 75 kilohertz side-scan sonar systems that have been used to scan most of the area searched so far.
With standard acoustic sonar, the image becomes less clear the farther a seabed object is from the equipment.
However, with SAS, the image remains sharp regardless of an object’s distance.
Fugro Survey, the Dutch underwater survey company hired by Australia to find the Boeing 777, has defended its choice of sonar and maintains the search has been thorough.
Fugro search director Paul Kennedy has described SAS as a developing technology with some questions about its reliability. As the search was in such a remote region, Fugro opted for established technology with ready supplies of spare parts.
ONGOING EXPEDITION
The Dong Hai Jiu 101 is to join two Fugro ships, Fugro Discovery and Fugro Equator, which are to continue to search with standard sonar equipment.
The Fugro Discovery lost its sonar unit and 4.5km of cable last weekend when the ship towed the equipment into an underwater volcano.
The ship was headed back to the Australian port of Fremantle to collect new cable to deploy with a spare sonar unit.
A fourth ship, Havila Harmony, is equipped with a maneuverable deep-sea drone that has been fitted with a camera and high-resolution sonar for searching difficult terrain and for taking a closer look at potential clues.
The drone was also recently damaged when it struck a fishing net, but has been repaired.
The ProSAS-60 sonar equipment aboard the Chinese ship is to be operated by marine services companies Phoenix International Holdings, based in Maryland, and Seattle-based Hydrospheric Solutions.
Both companies gained experience searching for Flight MH370 when they operated Go Phoenix, a ship that was contracted by Malaysia to take part in the search for eight months until June last year.
More than 85,000km2 of the search area have been scoured since late 2014.
The Chinese ship’s participation marks the first time China has agreed to share the financial cost of the search with Malaysia and Australia.
Truss yesterday thanked China for the contribution.
Most of the 239 people aboard Flight MH370 were Chinese.
The airplane vanished on March 8, 2014, after mysteriously flying far off course during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
A wing component found in July last year on the other side of the Indian Ocean when it washed up on Reunion Island is the only verified debris to have been recovered.
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