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Flight MH370 search has 'best lead so far' after picking up signals consistent with black box Flight MH370 search 'very close' to locating where missing aeroplane fell
(about 1 hour later)
US Navy equipment has picked up signals consistent with the pings from aircraft black boxes, an Australian search official said today. The head of the Australian agency co-ordinating the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 said the team is “very close” to locating the area where the aircraft fell, after a US Navy ‘ping’ locator towed by an Australian ship detected signals consistent with the beacons emitted from aircraft black box records.
He described the discovery as "a most promising lead" in the nearly month-long hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane. Angus Houston, a former Australian defence chief and head of the Australian search, told a news conference in Perth on Monday that this was the most promising lead yet in the month-long hunt for the aeroplane.
Australia’s Ocean Shield picked up the signals in an area 1,680km (1,040 miles) northwest of Perth, which analysis of sporadic satellite data has showed is the most likely place Boeing 777 went down.
Houston told reporters that he is “much more optimistic than I was a week ago.”
The first “ping” signal detection was held for more than two hours before the Ocean Shield lost contact, but the ship was able to pick up a signal aground 13 minutes, Houston said.
“We are encouraged that we are very close to where we need to be,” he said according to the Telegraph.
“On this occasion two distinct pinger returns were audible. Significantly, this would be consistent with transmissions from both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder,” he said.
“In the search so far it is probably the best information we have had. We are trying to fix the position on the basis of the transmissions.
“We are now in a very well defined search area, which hopefully will eventually yield the information that we need to say that MH370 might have entered the water just here.”
Despite his positivity, Mr Houston cautioned that the wreckage was still lost.
"I would want more information before we say ’this is it’.
“We are right on the edge of capability and we might be limited on capability if the aircraft ended up in deeper water. In very deep oceanic water, nothing happens fast,” said Houston.
“This is not the end of the search. We still have got difficult, painstaking work to do to confirm that this is indeed where the aircraft entered the water.”
He added that if the signals can be narrowed further, Bluefin 21, an autonomous underwater vehicle, can be used to try to locate wreckage on the sea floor and confirm whether the signals are from the aircraft’s flight recorders.
The potential search area was 4.5 km (2.8 miles) deep, the same as the Bluefin range.
As the recorders' batteries only last for 30 days, crews are working against the clock before the pings begin to fade, at which point the search will become more complicated.
Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency co-ordinating the search in the southern Indian Ocean, called it "very encouraging".Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency co-ordinating the search in the southern Indian Ocean, called it "very encouraging".
But he said it may take days to confirm whether signals picked up by the ship Ocean Shield are indeed from the flight recorders on Flight 370. A second search area was being maintained in waters where a Chinese vessel had also picked up “ping” signals at the weekend in an area more than 300 nautical miles from the latest signals.
The Australian navy ship Ocean Shield, using a US Navy towed pinger locator, detected the sounds on two occasions over a period totalling more than two-and-a-half hours. Chinese patrol ship Haixun 01 reported receiving a pulse signal with a frequency of 37.5 kHz, consistent with the signal emitted by flight recorders, on Friday and again on Saturday.
"Clearly this is a most promising lead, and probably in the search so far, it's the probably the best information that we have had," Mr Houston said at a news conference. Houston said the Chinese and Australian discoveries of pings were consistent with work done on analysing radar and satellite data but the Ocean Shield's leads were now the most promising.
"This would be consistent with transmissions from both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder." Houston on Sunday said he was comfortable with the level of cooperation between search countries, following criticisms that Australia only became aware of the Chinese find at the same time as the Xinhua state news agency filed a story from a reporter on board the Haixun.
He said the position of the noise needs to be further refined, and then an underwater autonomous vehicle can be sent in to investigate. “I'm very satisfied with the consultation, the coordination that we are building with our Chinese friends,” Houston said.
"It could take some days before the information is available to establish whether these detections can be confirmed as being from MH370. In very deep oceanic water, nothing happens fast." Search crews hope that data stored in the black boxes will answer what happened to the Malaysia Airlines plane and its 227 passengers and 12 crew when it vanished off radar on 8 March, and flew thousands of kilometres off its Kuala Lumpur-to-Beijing route.
The plane vanished on March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people on board, setting off an international search that started off Vietnam and then shifted to the southern Indian Ocean as information from radar and satellite data was refined. Authorities have not ruled out mechanical problems as a cause of the plane's disappearance but the loss of communications suggest it was deliberately diverted.
Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency co-ordinating the search in the southern Indian Ocean, called it "very encouraging". Additional reporting by Reuters
The length of the search and lack of any information on the cause of the plane to go so far off course has transfixed the world, and made finding the black boxes important to finding a possible cause.
Mr Houston said the Ocean Shield detected two separate signal detections in the northern part of the defined search area, with the first detected for approximately two hours and 20 minutes, and the second for 13 minutes on the ship's return trip over the same area.
He said the depth in the area is approximately 14,800 feet, and he warned that it was too early to say the transmissions were coming from the black boxes on the missing passenger jet.
"I would want more confirmation before we say this is it," he said.
"Without wreckage, we can't say it's definitely here. We've got to go down and have a look and hopefully we'll find it somewhere in the area that we narrowed to."