PERTH, Australia--An unmanned submersible vehicle will in the next 24 hours complete a scan of an area of the southern Indian Ocean--so far having found no trace of wreckage from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
The Bluefin-21 submersible will continue with its hunt if it again fails to make a discovery on its next mission moving further out from a circle on the sea floor with a 10 kilometer radius that investigators believe is the most likely location of the aircraft, the Australian agency coordinating the search effort said Sunday.
A continuing visual search of the sea's surface for floating debris by military aircraft and ships was suspended Sunday because of deteriorating weather, the Joint Agency Coordination Center said.
Flight 370 vanished from radar en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur on March 8 with 239 passengers and crew on board. Search efforts have so far proved fruitless turning up little more than fishing nets and other flotsam and an unrelated oil slick.
The U.S. Navy's Bluefin was on Sunday being prepared for its 15th dive to the seabed since it was first deployed from an Australian naval vessel April 14 to scan an area where searchers six days before that had picked up acoustic "pings" they believe came from the Boeing 777's black-box flight recorders.
Australian authorities have repeatedly cautioned the underwater search for debris will be long and difficult. Little is known about the seabed some 4.8 kilometers, or 3 miles, deep. Thick silt that may hide wreckage on the ocean floor and potentially strong currents may slow the movements of the Bluefin underwater vehicle.
The Australian search coordinator said the submersible is expected to complete its sonar scan of the focused underwater search area during its 15th mission and will move to adjacent areas if nothing is detected.
A sweep of the entire area around where a series of transmissions were heard on four occasions on April 5 and April 8 would need to cover 500 square miles. That would indicate a search lasting several more weeks at least, as the Bluefin moves at a walking pace, scanning for anomalies that might indicate the location of the aircraft. Authorities say Bluefin-21 can only cover around 15 square miles of seabed a day.
Countries involved in the search have been negotiating how they will manage the next phase of the search, including procedures for retrieving and analyzing information from the aircraft's "black-box" cockpit-voice and flight-data recorders and how any wreckage or human remains would be handled if recovered.
In all, 26 nations are assisting Malaysia, including the U.S., China, Japan and New Zealand.
Write to Robb M. Stewart at robb.stewart@wsj.com
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