Authorities co-ordinating the multinational search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane in the southern Indian Ocean are investigating three reports by ships in the search area that underwater sensors had picked up signals that could be from the plane’s data and voice recorders.
Two of the signals had been detected by a Chinese ship, one on Friday and the second on Saturday two kilometres away, officials said. The third was reported by an Australian ship, the Ocean Shield, in a different location about 300 nautical miles from the Chinese ship. The Ocean Shield is towing a US black box “pinger locator”. Continue.
The Chinese signals were reported by Xinhua, China’s official news agency, late on Saturday, saying that crew aboard the vessel Haixun 01 had picked up a “pulse signal” of the same frequency used by locator devices on planes. The devices, which use a frequency of 37.5 kilohertz, are attached to aircraft black boxes, which are crucial to determining the causes of plane crashes.
Retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, who is co-ordinating the search, said on Sunday in Perth that officials are treating all three acoustic soundings seriously.
“This is an important and encouraging lead but one which I urge you to continue to treat carefully,” Air Chief Marshall Houston said.
He said the reports could not be immediately verified – a sentiment also expressed by Malaysian and Chinese officials. “There is no confirmation at this stage that the signals and the objects are related to the missing aircraft,” he said.
False alerts can be triggered by sea life, including whales, or by noise from ships. Australian officials reported last week that an alert sounded on a British Royal Navy vessel, the H.M.S. Echo, which is equipped with black box detection equipment, but the signal turned out to be false.“At the moment, the data we have does not provide a means of verification,” he said.
“We have to do further investigation on the site itself, and that is why all of these resources are being moved to that particular location.British naval ship HMS Echo and Ocean Shield have been dispatched to the location of Haixun 01’s discovery to “discount or confirm” the detections, Mr Houston said.
It is now day 30 of the search and near the end of the black box emergency beacon’s battery life.
While the battery could last an extra eight to 10 days beyond that, Air Chief Marshal Houston admitted they were running out of time.
He also warned that, like the visual search for debris, the undersea search could also come up with leads that turned out to be false.
“Underwater, the environment is quite difficult. There are lots of occasions when noises will be transmitted over long distances depending on the temperature layers in the water and so on,” he said.
The news from the Chinese and Australian ship generated optimism about the possibility that officials might finally be zeroing in on concrete evidence of the plane and its fate.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott in Tokyo on Sunday, told reporters, “We are hopeful, but by no means certain.”
“We are searching for an aircraft which is at the bottom of a very deep ocean and it’s a very, very wide search area,” he said.
Meanwhile, the key search area has again been shifted to further south after update information about the condition of the satellite, which received data from MH370.
Up to 10 military planes, two civilian aircraft and 13 ships were involved in Sunday’s search, about 2000 kilometres northwest of Perth, totalling about 216,000 sq km.
The Boeing 777 was carrying 239 passengers when it vanished on March 8 on route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, triggering an international search.
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