KUALA LUMPUR, OCT 2, 2014:

The ships involved in the search for MAS flight MH370 are reportedly a matter of days away from finally locating the ill-fated Boeing 777-200 ER.

High-tech equipment including sonar and video cameras are set to arrive at a site in the Indian ocean, more than 1,500km off the Western Australian coast, within days, the Daily Mail reported.

GO Phoenix, the first of the ships contracted to conduct the underwater search, departed from Jakarta more than a week ago, after work was done to prepare it for the sea and weather conditions it would encounter.

Australian Transport and Safety Board chief commissioner Martin Dolan said GO Phoenix was set to arrive at the search area on Sunday.

He said the ship would deploy an underwater sonar at the end of an 8km-long cable.

“The ship will tow a sonar on a toefish, which contains sonar equipment close to the ocean floor, just about 100 metres.

“The sonar signals will go up the cable to the vessel and crewmen will analyse it for anything interesting.

“The Daily Mail quoted Dolan as saying that sonar signals will be recorded and transferred in batches, re-analysed so nothing is missed.”

The MAS plane en-route to Bejing on March 8 with 239 people on board veered off course and might have crashed.

The new stage of the search comes after months of detailed analysis and sea bed surveys, along a defined arc in the southern Indian Ocean.

The search area — dubbed the “priority area” — is an arc of 60,000 sq km off the Australian coast.

Dolan said because the ships were towing expensive equipment, they needed to know closely what the ocean floor was like and additional attention was needed for some areas to cover them properly.

He added the data itself required a specialised eye to understand and also to review.

Dolan said one factor that worried them was the unpredictable weather conditions in the area.

He pointed out that although the weather was improving, there could still be big swells and storms which might come through.

The Daily Mail reported that the Furgo Discovery which had completed fit out works in Durban, South Africa was en-route to Australia where it was expected to arrive in Fremantle on Sunday.

It will be joining GO Phoenix for the search of MH370 sometime in the third week of this month.

The third ship Furgo Equator will join the search after its bathymetric work is completed at the end of October.

The Daily Mail reported Dolan as saying that there were several “high probability” areas located that would be searched.

He said the second vessel would go to another high probability area and the third vessel would work between those two areas.

He also said until they had solid data, by locating the flight data boxes, no one would be able to form a view of what happened to MH370.