From the news today...
"In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Mr Abbott said if the Bluefin-21 underwater drone scanning the Indian Ocean's seabed in the search area fails to locate wreckage, a rethink would have to take place.
"We believe that search will be completed within a week or so," Mr Abbott said.
further on...
"We were very hopeful the Bluefin-21 would be the answer - the way to search for this very hard to find wreckage.
"What we found was the Bluefin-21 couldn't perform reliably.
"We had extremely frustrating aborted missions, just as we have seen in the Indian Ocean.
"We saw malfunctions."
Mike Dean, the US Navy's deputy director for salvage and diving, told CNN one of its Orion-towed search systems was available in Maryland for use in the search if Australia requested it.
The Orion can send back real-time data to searchers.
Other search experts say a REMUS 6000 autonomous underwater vehicle, used to find Air France flight 447 after it went down in 2009, would be more suitable."
They have a REMUS 6000 on board the OS. It has a working depth of 6000m.
Not sure of the way it is equipped, but this fish can also carry the sidescan, multi-beam, sub-bottom, and video array. Same sort of programming.
Both fish are around $2.5 million each.
Given the realtively narrow search path of these fish, it would seem a towed array would be better, not sure why they decided to switch.