Plymouth based HMS Echo, one of the Royal Navy’s hydrographic survey vessels is searching for signals from the missing Malaysian airliner's “black box”, 1,100 miles from Perth, Australia.
The vessel left for an 18-month deployment, in June 2013, to update charts of the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Indian Ocean but was redeployed in the search operation for the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 which went missing on March 8.
Echo has dry-docked and been repaired at Falmouth docks many times during her career – the last time being in 2013 before her latest deployment.
Echo was launched at Appledore in Devon in 2002, and was designed to carry out a wide range of survey work, including support to submarine and amphibious operations, through the collection of oceanographic and bathymetric (analysis of the ocean, its salinity and sound profile) data.
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