Malaysia Airjet News Update: In the hope of recovering Malaysia Airlines MH370's data recorder, two ships with detector are searching a 240km underwater path. The search is being coordinated from the city of Perth in Western Australia.
Australia naval vessel Ocean Shield and HMS Echo were using a towed pinger locator from the US Navy in search of the plane's black box.
"The two ships will search a single 240km track converging on each other," Angus Houston, head of the Joint Agencies Coordination Center (JACC) said. The retired Air Chief Marshall added that the two ships had "commenced the sub-surface search for emissions from [the] black box pinger".
According to Houston, satellite data has been the basis for the area of search. The area of highest probability as to where the plane might have entered the water and how the aircraft might have performed and flown are pointed out and refined to determine the location of the missing aircraft from the best data that is available.
"There is some hope we will find the aircraft in the area we are searching", Houston added.
The two ships will be moving at reduced speeds, of around three knots, in their attempt to detect any signal from the pinger according to BBC News.
The focus is on a search area of about 217,000 sq km (84,000 sq miles), 1,700 km (1,000 miles) North West of Perth.
According to Commodore Peter Leavy, Commander of Joint Task Force 658, the search operations generally preferred to use "physical evidence" and "drift modelling" to locate the plane.
In addition, Leavy said, "No hard evidence has been found to date so we have made the decision to search a sub-surface area on which the analysis has predicted MH370 is likely to have flown."
Up to 14 planes and 9 ships were deployed to take part in search of the missing plane that disappeared on March 8 en route from Kula Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing, China carrying 239 people on board.
The airjet which is believed to have crashed in the Southern Indian Ocean has no confirmed debris found yet.
The plane's black box stopped transmitting about 30 days after the crash. Since it is battery operated, the searchers perhaps have only few days to locate it now.
