PERTH, Australia — Search crews sent a robotic submarine deep into the Indian Ocean for the first time on Monday after failing to pick up any signals from the missing Malaysian airliner's black boxes for six days, the leader of the search effort said. Meanwhile, officials were investigating an oil slick not far from the area where the last underwater sounds were detected, said Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency coordinating the search off Australia's west coast. Crews have collected a sample of the oil and are sending it back to Australia for analysis, a process that will take several days. The oil does not appear to be from any of the ships in the area, but Houston cautioned against jumping to conclusions about its source. The unmanned underwater vehicle, the Bluefin 21, was launched Monday evening from the Australian navy ship Ocean Shield, the joint agency said. The autonomous sub can create a three-dimensional sonar map of any debris on the seafloor. The move comes after crews picked up a series of underwater sounds over the past two weeks that were consistent with signals from an aircraft's black boxes, which contain flight data and cockpit voice recordings. The devices emit “pings” so they can be more easily found, but their batteries last only about a month, and it has been more than a month since the plane vanished. “Today is day 38 of the search,” Houston told a news conference. “We haven't had a single detection in six days, so I guess it's time to go under water.” Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott raised hopes last week when he said authorities were “very confident” the four underwater signals that have been detected were from the black boxes on Flight 370, which disappeared March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people on board. But Houston warned that while the signals are a promising lead, the public needs to be realistic about the challenges facing search crews in the extremely remote, deep patch of ocean — an area he dubbed “new to man.” “I would caution you against raising hopes that the deployment of the autonomous underwater vehicle will result in the detection of the aircraft wreckage. It may not,” Houston said. “However, this is the best lead we have, and it must be pursued vigorously. Again, I emphasize that this will be a slow and painstaking process.” The Ocean Shield had been dragging a US Navy device called a towed pinger locator through the water to listen for any sounds from the black boxes' beacons. The Bluefin sub takes six times longer to cover the same area as the ping locator, and the two devices can't be used at the same time. Crews had been hoping to detect additional signals before sending down the sub, so they could triangulate the source and zero in on where exactly the black boxes may be. The submarine will take 24 hours to complete each mission: two hours to dive to the bottom, 16 hours to search the seafloor, two hours to return to the surface, and four hours to download the data, Houston said. In its first deployment, it will search a 40-square kilometer (15-square mile) section of seafloor. — AP
