A robotic mini-submarine on Saturday continued to scour the remote depths of the Indian Ocean for signs of wreckage of the missing Malaysian jet even as Malaysia said the search was at a “critical juncture”.
“The narrowing of the search for Saturday and Sunday is at a critical juncture,” said Malaysia’s Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, adding that the search area for the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 has narrowed and that the Bluefin-21 would finish searching the area within the next week.
“I appeal to everyone around the world to pray and pray hard that we find something to work on in the next couple of days,” he said.
The Bluefin-21 submersible is mapping the area of the sea bed within a 10 km radius of where acoustic signals were detected believed to be from the plane’s flight recorder.
Operated by the US Navy off the Australian vessel Ocean Shield, the Bluefin is an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that can identify objects by creating a sonar map of the sea floor, as the search entered its 43rd day.
It is searching in an area defined by four acoustic signals picked up by an Australian search team, and was deployed after officials concluded that the batteries on the plane’s flight recorders would likely have expired, given their one-month shelf life.