Flight MH370 Search Team to Get a Third Vessel with an Underwater Vehicle Next Month!

The search team for the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, whose focus is currently on the remote part of the southern Indian Ocean, will get a much-needed lift with the impending arrival of a third Fugro vessel beginning next week.

The news was announced by the Joint Agency Coordination Centre on November 25. It came just days after Australian authorities said that the focus of the current search for the wreckage of the Flight MH370 will shift to a specific area that was recently identified by a British pilot flying a Boeing 777, reports the International Business Times.

Fugro, the Dutch survey company that was commissioned by the search team, will be fielding a third vessel into the nearly two-year-old endeavor.

The Havila Harmony will be joining the Fugro Discovery and the Fugro Equator in the search. It features a Hugin 4500 Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) that is capable of scouring the most difficult parts of the ocean floor.

The AUV of the Havila Harmony shall be able to survey the most difficult portions of the hunt that cannot be searched as effectively by the deep tow search systems of the Fugro Discovery and the Fugro Equator, details Upstream Online.

The Hugin 4500 is actually an Echo Surveyor VII underwater vehicle which has an underwater camera.

Reports have it that the Havila Harmony will initially undergo some calibration tests off Fremantle in Western Australia before joining the search on December 3. It shall have a crew complement of 40.

In a recent statement, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre said that only one vessel is currently conducting search operations on the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 after a recent medical emergency of a crew member onboard Fugro Discovery halted its operations.

The vessel has since sailed to Fremantle to have its injured crew, who has been experiencing severe pain, taken to the hospital.

The center also said that the incident is a reminder of the difficult conditions under which crew members of the search vessels work. The vessels spend 42 days at sea between port calls under weather conditions which can be physically arduous and tiring for the crew.

The medical emergency incident is the second time this month. Early this month, a crew member of Fugro Discovery also fell ill that forced the vessel to return to port so the crew member could receive immediate treatment at a hospital in Australia. The crew member was diagnosed to be suffering from appendicitis.

A controlled ditch

There were reports that came out last week saying that the deep-sea hunt for the missing Malaysian Airlines plane will focus on the area where Captain Simon Hardy believes that the plane made a controlled ditch into the sea.

In a statement issued to reporters on November 22, Hardy said that he is fairly confident that the wreckage will be found within the next four to eight weeks.

More than 20 months since the disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 in March last year, remains of the ill-fated plane have yet to be found.

The multi-million dollar search for the ill-fated plane has dragged on for months with very little success. While a wing part of the plane was already found a few months ago off the coast of Reunion Island in Africa, the full wreckage remains missing.

After witnessing the near futility of the efforts of the combined search teams of the governments of Australia, Malaysia, and China, in looking for the wreckage of the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, the United Nations, in a conference held in Geneva, Switzerland on November 11, has agreed to use global satellite tracking for passenger airliners.