Prime Minster: Australia won’t ‘abandon’ MH370 families

It’s a determined effort, but there have been few headlines so far.

A high-tech underwater drone was completing its 10th mission on Wednesday, hoping to find even a trace of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

The Bluefin-21 has scanned about 80% of the intended territory without finding any sign of the Boeing 777 jetliner.

Stormy weather postponed the air search for a second day on Wednesday. The ships plying the waters off the coast of Australia kept their vigil.

And despite the search efforts for MH370 repeatedly coming up empty during these 47 days, there’s no suggestion the hunt in the southern Indian Ocean is anywhere close to ending.

Quite to the contrary, according to Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

“We are not going to abandon … the families of the 239 people who were on that plane by lightly surrendering while there is reasonable hope of finding something,” he said on Wednesday. “We may well re-think the search, but we will not rest until we have done everything we can to solve this mystery.”

Malaysian and Australian authorities are already mapping out a long-term strategy for the search, which could conceivably go on for months or years, if the two-year search for Air France Flight 447 is any guide.

Guidelines drafted by Malaysia raise the possibility of a significantly wider search area should the current underwater search fail to turn up evidence of the plane. The document discusses how best to deploy resources, including new underwater search assets.

Investigators would love to find the flight data recorders from Flight 370, a potential treasure trove of information into what happened to the jetliner and the 239 passengers and crew on board.

If found, the black boxes would likely go to the Australian Transport Safety Board’s accident investigation lab.

But it’s up to the Malaysians where they want the boxes to go, because this is officially their investigation.

Australia is just one of a handful of countries that have the capability and technical know-how to decipher what’s inside a black box.

Sometimes getting the data is simple.

“A lot of our work is with undamaged recorders, and it’s very easy to download them much as you would a USB memory stick,” said Neil Campbell, an Australian transport safety investigator with more than two decades of experience.

But the process becomes much more technical if the recorders are damaged.

In the case of water damage, possible after weeks at the bottom of the ocean, Campbell will rinse the board very carefully, then use a water displacement liquid, before drying out the circuit board in an oven. That process can take a couple of days.

After that it’s a question of downloading the raw data and decoding the information, or in the case of the voice recorder, listening to what was said.

It may be the only way the families of those on board the March 8 flight — that set off from the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur destined for Beijing — may get answers to the questions they’ve been asking.

“There’s a satisfaction in working out what happened with the accident and the conclusions, and the closure that that brings,” Campbell said.