Search for MH370 continues, no signal detected in nearly a week

The search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 continues in the south Indian Ocean. It's now 38 days since the Beijing-bound plane vanished after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, with 239 people on board.  [Special coverage]

The Joint Agency Coordination Center said up to 12 aircraft and 15 ships will assist in Monday's search for the flight as efforts to find the missing Malaysian airliner move into their fifth week.

The agency said there have been no confirmed acoustic detections over the past 24 hours. It has been nearly a week since the last audio detections of what officials say is likely to be the blackbox 'pings', and fears are growing that the box's batteries are dead or dying. The Australian Maritime Safety Authority has planned a visual search area of more than 47 thousand square kilometers on Monday.

The center of the search area is about 22 hundred kilometers northwest of Perth. The search area is about one thousand square kilometers smaller than Sunday. The Australian Defense Vessel Ocean Shield continues more focused sweeps with the Towed Pinger Locator to try and locate further signals related to aircraft black boxes.

A Chinese military aircraft has taken off from Perth Airport to resume the search for debris. The weather forecast for the day is south easterly winds with possible showers, sea swells up to 1.5 meters and visibility of three to five kilometers.