The hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has begun once again, six months since the jet vanished. The search for the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was resumed Monday in the Indian Ocean, according to the Associated Press.
The first and one of three ships to spend up to a year searching for the wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is the "GO Phoenix." The vessel began searching far off Australia's west coast and is expected to spend up to 12 days hunting for the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 jet before heading back to shore for refuelling.
GO Phoenix left Jakarta in late September and has just arrived the search area, sweeping the area on Monday with a sonar device known as a towfish, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Apart from the sonar, crews will also be using video cameras and jet fuel sensors to comb the seabed for the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The Boeing 777 was on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it mysteriously vanished on March 8 carrying 239 passengers.
According to NBC News, crews will be using new equipment in the farthest depths of the Indian Ocean to solve one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries. Investigators deemed the plane crashed because of low fuel supply.
The arrival of the GO Phoenix to search for the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took place after a four-month hiatus.
"We're cautiously optimistic," said chief commissioner Martin Dolan, of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
"But it's just a very big area that we're looking at," added Dolan from the agency leading the search.
Search for the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 had been stopped for four months since crews had to map the seabed in the search zone. About 1,100 miles west of Australia, the search zone is a 23,000-square mile search site lying along what is called the "seventh arc" - a stretch of the ocean where experts assumed the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 jet crashed after it ran out of fuel.
According to the AP, officials based their theories largely on analyzed transmissions between the plane and a satellite to estimate where the aircraft entered the water exactly.
An independent group of satellite experts and other analysts based their beliefs on information released by Australian authorities. According to them, the search for the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is expected to begin at the southernmost point of the previously designated high-priority area, which is estimated to be around the dimension of Tasmania.
"It's an acknowledgment that the further south solution is more likely" to answer the puzzle of where the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 plane went down, said northern California-based satellite industry consultant Tim Farrar.
Despite application of high-tech apparatus in the new search area, the search teams will not be met without certain difficulties.
Since the ocean is deeper further to the south in the new hunt location, storms have a tendency to be more violent. Logistics are also harder since search ships may need to voyage hundreds of additional miles from Australian ports, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, two other ships provided by Dutch contractor Fugro are set to take on the highly treacherous journey to join the Malaysian-contracted GO Phoenix for the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 search. The ships will be joining the hunt officially late October.
Dolan said one of the two ships set for October arrival, the "Fugro Discovery," docked in the Western Australian port of Fremantle on Sunday for the fitting of a towfish and other equipment. The Discovery's estimated date of arrival at the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 search zone is on Oct. 17.
Meanwhile, the third vessel, the "Fugro Equator," is still completing its survey of an arc of seafloor where the search is concentrated. The seafloor mapping will finish by the end of the month, after which it will be going to Fremantle to be fitted with similar search equipment, said Dolan.
A towfish, a sonar device, will be dragged by the ships above the water to search for the wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Equipped with sensors for the detection of jet fuel, the towfish is capable of handling the extreme sea depths of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 search zone, which in some areas is 4 miles deep.
Apparently, if crews find anything interesting on the sonar, a video camera will be attached to the towfish to film the seabed.
Dolan expressed some cautious optimism about the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 plane's discovery.
For about 100 days, military search crews reportedly spent much of their efforts scanning the ocean floor in hopes of finding the plane, but to no avail. An initial underwater search also revealed no wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
The new Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 search area is expected to result positively. Many experts are hoping that the search will finally end and peace will be brought to the victims' relatives.
"We're confident in the analysis and we're confident that the aircraft is close to the seventh arc," said Dolan.
Malaysia and Australia are each contributing around $120 million for the funding of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 search.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
