Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak will travel to Perth tomorrow to visit RAAF Base Pearce, to get a first hand look at the search for missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 and to express his nation’s thanks to the international crews taking part.

The search operations center at Pearce coordinates a host of aircraft:  Two Malaysian C-130s, a Chinese Ilyushin IL-76, a Japanese Coast Guard G5, an Australian P3-Orion, a New Zealand P-3 Orion, a New Zealand civilian aircraft, a American P-8 Poseidon, a Japanese P-3 Orion and a Korean P-3 Orion.

An Australia Orion was diverted from the search to search the Southern Ocean near Antarctica for a missing fishing boat.  But the plane was called back as it was determined there is no chance anyone could have survived in the harsh polar climate.  The crew found debris in the water where the boat was last believed to have been.  That search was far more fruitful than the search for MH 370.  Every object spotted in the water and retrieved so far has turned out to be flotsam from the vast plastic soup polluting the oceans.

The Australian vessel Ocean Shield and its American “black box locator” will reach the search area in a couple of days, but it’s a race against the clock.  The batteries in the “black box” (which are actually bright orange) flight data and voice recorders are expected to run out of juice in about a week.  But even when the ship gets there, it’s not going to cover a lot of area.  In order to work properly, the device must be towed at five kilometers per hour.  That will cover a few hundred kilometers, while the hunt spans 254,000 square kilometers.

And, officials in Kuala Lumpur are correcting the record:  The final radio transmission from MH370 was not, as often reported, “All right, good night.”  Malaysia's Transport Ministry now says the final voice transmission from the cockpit of Flight 370 was actually “Good night Malaysian three-seven-zero.”