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Drone deployed in hunt for MH 370 aborts mission

The undersea drone deployed to assist in the search for missing flight MH 370 has aborted its first mission after six hours. The submarine dived to a depth beyond its operating capabilities when a built in safety feature kicked in returning the Bluefin-21 back to the surface. Weather conditions in the area since the crash have not helped the search. Charitha Pattiaratchi is from the University of Western Australia: “In this region there has been a big eddy, which is going round and round. So if any debris came from the plane it would have been contained around a 200 km radius, but we also had a tropical cyclone, a typhoon, very close to that area, it would have mixed up the whole area, so any debris at the surface would have been sinking.” The American made Bluefin-21 is on a mission to plot a sonar map of the area where the Boeing 777 is thought to have gone down. The vessel can function down to a depth of 3,500 meters, the ocean floor in the Southeren Indian Ocean is located 4,500 metres below the surface.