MH370: 8 aircraft,11 ships continue today's search

Up to 8 military aircraft and 11 ships will assist in today's search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Today the Australian Maritime Safety Authority has planned a visual search area totaling approximately 57,311 square kilometres. The centre of the search area lies approximately 1584 kilometres north west of Perth.

The weather forecast for today is for isolated showers, with south easterly winds up to 20 knots, sea swells of two to 2.5 metres and visibility of one kilometre in thunderstorms and three kilometres in rain.

Early into mission 13 yesterday Bluefin-21 was recovered due to a software issue that required resetting. The AUV has technically sophisticated equipment and a reset is not uncommon. Overnight Phoenix technicians resolved the issue and mission 14 is now underway.

Bluefin-21 has completed approximately 95 per cent of the focused underwater search area. No contacts of interest have been found to date.

The focused underwater search area is defined as a circle of 10km radius around the second Towed Pinger Locator detection which occurred on 8 April. If no contacts of interest are made, Bluefin-21 will continue to examine the areas adjacent to the 10km radius. - Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC)