Page 27 - Ocean Shield News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Today's search update from the joint agency coordination center. big headline there, there have been no new acoustic detections in the past 24 hours but the search for the elusive pings continues. australian vessel, ocean shield, combing waters with american towed pinger trying to detect any signals. hsm echo by its side. efforts by air as well, stralgian sstralg i australian surveillance planes over head. it has to be said it has been silent since tuesday. no new pings since tuesday. authorities have said they will exhaust efforts until they are absolutely certain that those black box batteri...

The search about this time every day wraps up, at least the aerial search. what is happening today? >> reporter: hi, victor. well, the search for the elusive pings is continuing. as far as we know the ocean shield and the british vessel the "hms echo" continue to comb the waters. efforts by air as well, surveillance planes trying to pick up any pings from the sonar buoys they have deployed out on to the waters. as far as we know it's been silent since tuesday. authorities have long said they want to exhaust this effort. they want to be absolutely certain the black box pinger battery has comple...

Tony abbott, over the last couple of days expressing some level of confidence of finding these black boxes. but let me ask you this. how close are they now to finding the airliner's flight recorders? >> reporter: we haven't been given a specific timetable. yesterday the australian prime minister tony abbott saying that it'll likely take some time for them to physically locate the black box. they have 2.8 miles of water to contend with. as you mentioned, he is confident, though. he said that they are looking in the right place. but we're still at the stage of the search in which they're still t...

Do that? well, the next step is submersible, the flbluefin. takes two hours to lower it down, 16 hours down, and two hours to bring it back up again and then time to download the data. it's time consuming process and it travels literally at walking pace which is why they're getting the vessels, the "ocean shield" and the "echo" to go down and sweep those areas for as long as they can before they finally have to accept that those pingers aren't going to ping any more. and then they go to that submersible

They've honed it in. clive, what do you make of the expansion of the search donzone rather than it condensing? >> it's important to acknowledge the search area is expanding and contracting at the same time. it's expanding in order to look for floating wreckage on the ocean and it's contracting as a result of the work being done on the ocean shield and what -- i think we have to accept the pings are probably over, but that's not too tragic, because after the all the information flight recorder will be preserved for at least two years. the other thing that's fascinating, the combination of the o...