All the team at “Fly a jet fighter” wanted to give their respect to the people who lost their lives on the MH370. This has been an extraordinary event, in the real sense of the word, as we have been three weeks without the sightless understanding of what happened. The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) has shifted the search area for the lost Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER northeast from the previous location owing to revised calculations of the aircraft’s speed. Following AMSA’s receipt of a “new credible lead”, the search has been moved 1,100km to the northeast of the previous search zone to a location 1,850 west of Perth. The new search area is approximately 319,000km2, it adds. “The new information is based on continuing analysis of radar data between the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca before radar contact was lost,” says AMSA. “It indicated that the aircraft was travelling faster than previously estimated, resulting in increased fuel usage and reducing the possible distance the aircraft travelled south into the Indian Ocean.” It adds that the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation is re-tasking satellites to search the new area. Weather conditions, which have hampered the airborne search for the last two days, have improved, allowing ten aircraft to be dispatched to search for wreckage of MH370 on 28 March. As the search for flight MH370 persists, Europe’s aviation safety authority has, ironically, been assessing the costs of reinforcing the underwater locator features on aircraft and their flight recorders.
This assessment is part of a proposal drawn up after the similar loss of Air France flight AF447 aimed at avoiding frustrating and expensive efforts to trace aircraft missing over oceans. European Aviation Safety Agency regulators are seeking to raise, from 30 days to 90 days, the minimum transmission duration of acoustic 37.5kHz underwater locator beacons installed on the cockpit-voice and flight-data recorders. The measures also call for installation of 8.8kHz beacons on aircraft performing long-range overwater flights. Both were put forwards as part of a broader package to make flight recorders more robust and easier to locate. EASA’s comment period for the proposals closed on 20 March as search and rescue organisations struggled to cover vast areas of remote oceanic territory in the hunt for Malaysia Airlines’ missing Boeing 777.