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MH370 Lt Erica Ross, commander of a P-3 Orion aircraft of the United States Navy, and navy officer Francis Enriquez were in high spirits despite having done 75 hours of flying and not finding any trace of a missing Malaysian airliner.

"We did not find anything today. We will continue tomorrow," said Ross nonchalantly.

"There is no timeline. We are going to be here as long as we are needed," said Enriquez, showing no sign of any boredom.

Both Ross and Enriquez are among the 11 crew of the P-3 Orion on what one would call a never-give-up mission.

They are helping Malaysia locate a Malaysia Airlines (MAS) Boeing 777-200ER which went missing with 239 people on board en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8.

A search was mounted for the aircraft in the South China Sea but the area of the search was extended to cover a large tract west of Malaysia, including the Indian Ocean, when it was learned that the plane had veered off course after someone deliberately switched off the communication system on board and the plane had flown for seven hours after that.

The search then focused on two corridors, namely the northern corridor which stretches from the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to northern Thailand, and the southern corridor which stretches from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean.

This reporter rode on the P-3 Orion on Saturday from the Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport in Subang to the southern Indian Ocean, near the Christmas and Cocos islands, the flight taking seven hours to and fro.

Three hours were spent scouring a quadrant of 25,000 square nautical miles looking for anything that could be linked to MH370.

It was during these three hours that Enriquez, aircrewman first class from the US navy base in Okinawa, Japan, was glued to five radar screens.

He monitored the screens that could channel their display onto on-flight surveillance cameras.

Enriquez also monitored a horizontal graph screen which showed any electromagnetic anomaly detected by a metal scanner mounted at the tail of the aircraft.

He said the scanner could detect metal on and below the surface of the sea.

He has been doing this on all the flights since March 9, a day after MH370 disappeared.

"We are here to assist the Malaysian government in searching for MH370," he said.

The Saturday flight of the P-3 Orion was its seventh mission.

The quadrant of 25,000 square nautical miles is a portion of the 2.24 million square nautical miles of ocean almost the size of Australia.

Ross said she had spent about 90 per cent of the flying time with the same crew.

"We have good crew members," she said.

Despite having found nothing, both Ross and Enriquez are not giving up just yet. Tomorrow is another day of search and hope.

- Bernama

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