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Australia Selects Fugro to Renew Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Search
Fugro Will Deploy Two Vessels to Try to Locate the Missing Jetliner
Updated Aug. 5, 2014 11:06 p.m. ET
Survey vessel Fugro Equator sails offshore Thailand. Reuters
SYDNEY—Australia on Wednesday selected Dutch oil-and-gas consulting firm Fugro NV to lead a rebooted search for Malaysia Airlines 3786.
The selection follows a month-long tender process that also attracted bids from groups that specialize in recovering wrecks from deep water, including previous efforts to locate the Titanic in the mid-1980s and an Air France jetliner that crashed in the mid-Atlantic Ocean in 2009.
Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said Fugro would deploy two vessels carrying a range of equipment including towed deep-water vehicles and video cameras to try to locate the jetliner, which went missing on March 8 en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 passengers and crew on board.
The search effort in an area spanning 20,000 square miles could take up to a year following its restart in early September.
"I remain cautiously optimistic that we will locate the missing aircraft within the priority search area, but this search will obviously be a challenging one" Mr. Truss said.
The hunt for Flight 370 has been overshadowed in recent weeks by the Malaysia Airlines jet shot down in Ukraine, but it remains one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history. Military search crews spent about 100 days scanning the Indian Ocean surface for debris after the Boeing 777 went missing, but turned up only floating garbage such as old fishing nets. An initial underwater search also failed to find any trace of the plane.
Officials also have repeatedly shifted the search area, underscoring the lack of clues to the plane's likely whereabouts. In late June, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau moved the search zone as much as 600 miles south of where the previous phase of the underwater hunt was focused, following more detailed analysis of digital handshakes, or so-called ping transmissions between Flight 370 and a telecommunications satellite owned by Inmarsat. This area straddles an arc extending across thousands of miles of sea, which is based on the final ping transmission that the plane made with the Inmarsat satellite. Authorities think this communication was the plane's electrical systems rebooting after its engines ran out of fuel.
Fugro has already dispatched the Fugro Discovery vessel to the Western Australia state capital Perth from the U.K., and will also use the Fugro Equator vessel, which is currently collecting bathymetry data as part of a joint effort with the Chinese ship Zhu Kezhen to map the sea floor in the search zone.
According to Mr. Truss, three-fifths of the search zone has been surveyed since April. The data could give Fugro a better understanding of the topography of the sea floor to ensure its equipment doesn't bang into deep-water ridges or get lost in ocean trenches.
Fugro would be supported in its search for Flight 370 by four Malaysian vessels, including two ships equipped with side-scan sonar and remotely operated vehicles.
Australia retains control of the search effort for Flight 370, while Malaysia continues to lead the investigation into what caused the aircraft to deviate from its original flight plan and ultimately head toward the southern Indian Ocean.
Australian authorities said in late June that they believe someone on board Flight 370 likely switched on the cockpit's autopilot system deliberately, putting the plane on a direct path to the southern Indian Ocean. They also said the end to Flight 370 was best explained by all passengers and crew becoming unresponsive, possibly after becoming deprived of oxygen. That was more likely than other scenarios such as the plane's systems malfunctioning or a stall due to storms, they said, based on the plane's steady altitude, its loss of radio communications, and other factors.