It is now Day 43 and the seventh Saturday since MAS flight MH370 mysteriously diverted from its Beijing route and vanished without a single trace in the vicinity of the South Indian Ocean on March 8.
Latest developments
- Underwater search based on previous pings believed to be from a black box continues, but there has been no positive discovery to date
M’sia extends sympathy over South Korean ferry disaster
5pm: The Malaysian government, including the Flight MH370 search team, extended their sympathies and condolences to the victims and families involved in the South Korean ferry tragedy, Bernama reports.
"We emphathise and can imagine how difficult it can be for the families and the search and rescue team coping with the situation.
"All our thoughts and prayers are with them," acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein is quoted saying.
The ferry, carrying more than 450 passengers and crew, most of them high school students, capsised on Wednesday while enroute to the southern holiday island of Jeju.
Twenty-nine people are now known to have died in the disaster, with 179 rescued so far.
Pray as search is at critical juncture, says minister
3.30pm: Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein says the next 48 hours are a "critical juncture" for the search efforts.
This is the period when a plot of seabed narrowed down by experts will be scrutinised for signs of wreckage.
“I appeal to everybody around the world to pray and pray hard that we find something to work on over the next couple of days,” he tells a press conference today.
Salient points from the press conference:
- Search methods and previous clues will all be reviewed if nothing is found in the next two days, but the search will still go on.
The Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) says the underwater drone has covered 133 square kilometres so far, and have found “no contacts of interest”.
The data from its sixth mission was completed overnight, and its seventh voyage into the depths of the Indian Ocean has already begun, said the agency in a statement.
Meanwhile, 11 aircraft and 12 ships will be searching the ocean’s surface for debris today, covering 50,200 square kilometres across three areas.
Recap
The underwater search for MH370 is now focussed on locating the source of the pings detected by the Australian vessel ADV Ocean Shield on April 7 and April 8.
The sounds were detected on four separate occasions in the same area, and analysis has found it to be consistent with underwater locator beacons (or pingers) used on aircraft black boxes.
However, visual verification is still needed confirm whether this location about 1,640 kilometres northwest of Perth is MH370’s final resting place.
The visual search is taking place in different areas to account for ocean drift, but JACC chief Angus Houston had said that further searching of the ocean surface is unlikely to yield any results, and he will have to discuss with search partners about discontinuing it.
In an interview on Monday, he attributed to the lack of surface debris to the fact that the search in the South Indian Ocean had started late.
“I think one of the things about aircraft wreckage on the surface is you've got to find where the aircraft crashed very early on in the search,” he say.