- Jul 14, 2003
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ABC News
ABC News
Malaysia Plane Search Is Race Against Time as Black Box Ticks Down
The search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is becoming a race against time as the plane's black box will ping for only a month, and instead of narrowing, the search area has been expanded to mind boggling dimensions.
Already the block box has lost a third of its battery life since the plane vanished and the search area now encompasses 2.24 million square miles -- 10 times the size of Texas -- extending in the north from China and Kazakhstan south to Australia. Authorities hope to find the black boxes in order to understand what went wrong on flight MH370.
Malaysia’s Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said today that the search has faced diplomatic, technical and logistical challenges.
“The search and rescue operations have taken on a new international dimension,” he said. “This is an enormous search area. And it is something that Malaysia cannot possibly search on its own.”
The closest that investigators have come to narrowing the search is a statement by Hishammuddin today that there will be a “special focus on the southern corridor.” That area alone -- a vast expanse that is primarily open water in the Indian Ocean -- is 160,000 square miles.
Background checks clean
China's ambassador to Malaysia said his country had carried out a detailed probe into its nationals aboard the flight and could rule out their involvement.
U.S. and European security sources said efforts by various governments to investigate the backgrounds of everyone on the flight had not, as of Monday, turned up links to militant groups or anything else that could explain the jet's disappearance.
A European diplomat in Kuala Lumpur also said trawls through the passenger manifest had come up blank.
what might be the most far-ranging and multi-national search and rescue operation ever