flight 370, more than three months after the flight went missing. after taking off from kuala lumpur. at the request, australia has been leading the search. the plane is thought to be resting in australia s air search area. the search remains a highly complex operation and involves vast areas of ocean, and can rely on only limited data and aircraft flight information. from the little available data, specialists at an early stage calculated that the aircraft entered the sea, close to a long but narrow arc in the southern indian ocean. this arc has been the focus of the search efforts since late march. the effort to find evidence of the missing aircraft near this arc has already become the biggest search operation in history. covering 4.5 million square kilometers of ocean surface.
and their sensing techniques underneath the area and also a separate air search area, aircraft flying through the skies monitoring closely the surface of the ocean to see whether they can find debris of the missing airliner. you see that every day, almost. the search area has been getting smaller and smaller, and it s important to point out that s not because of any data they ve received, any new data that s been received. it s simply because they ve established these four separate acoustic events, four separate ping detections over the course of the past week. the last one was four days around and used that to triangulate this very rough area of the indian roeocean, where t think the most likely places where the airliner went down and you going through a methically by bit, bit by bit, to locate any sign of all of wreckage, locate the black box flight recorders from the malaysian aircraft are and so far have come up with nothing.
the hms echo, though, it s got a two-mile-wide coverage. it s not high resolution like the bluefin submersible, but way broader brush strokes, if you like, and much faster. we ve talked before about the silted bottom down there. perhaps meters of silt at the bottom. that would give off this echo from hms echo would give a soft signal back, if you like. now, that means that if there is a plane down there or wreckage down there, it would give off a hard signal. so it s obviously out there to sort of help now that we know those pings are in that area. going to go do broad brush strokes and see if they can found wreckage. meanwhile, the other ships are a few hundred miles from the west where experts think any debris from the suspected crash site would have drifted over the weeks since mh-370 disappeared, wolf. michael holmes on the scene for us in perth. thank you. we also have new compelling details of what may have happened in the first few hours
midnight for us here. but whether they detected anything else from the time that they last announced it, we don t know. it s quite possible. now you have the pinger locator. you have the sonabuoys in area and also have hms echo. so lots of assets. f they are listening for those pings. will we get good news later on today? i m going to bet the search crews are hoping so, wolf. are you surprised, miles, 35 days in they re still hearing pings? you know, aviation is the kind of thing where there s always margin that is added. whatever you build, if the spec is 30 days, the engineers are really building it for 40. that s just how aviation is as safe as it is, and that s just how engineers who are involved in this business operate. so it doesn t surprise me too much. you know, what i was concerned about was that they operated in the first place. were they damaged on impact? if the pingers were to start going, the fact that they re
i want go to perth, australia, the base of the operation of the search. michael holmes is on the scene with more. what s the latest there, michael? reporter: yeah, we re going to have the search planes out again. more than a dozen of them, wolf. they ll be leaving in the sectithefection few hours. also, those ships, again, are going to be scouring the ocean today. something rene mentioned is really interesting. ocean shield joined now, we reported this to you yesterday, that it was headed to the ocean shield area. the search area where they ve been getting these pings. now, hms echo, it s a british naval ship. now, what it is, it has the ability, it s an oceanography ship. it has the ability to scour the ocean using echo sonar. scouring the floor obviously trying to find evidence of wreckage below. now, as rene said, this bluefin submersible, it s a tedious operation with that. it goes literally at walking pace, takes a full day to go down, cover some space, come back up.