PERTH, April 8 – Searchers in the race against time to find missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 have not detected any new signals that could be from the missing plane’s black box recorder, authorities said today.
Retired Australian defence force chief Angus Houston said underwater vehicles would not be launched until a signal is received or until there was no doubt that the batteries in the black box recorders had expired.
“Only when we stop the pinger search will we deploy the submersible, unless we get another transmission in which case we are better able to know what is down there,” Air Chief Marshal Houston said.
“The issue is that if we can’t get another transmission we can’t get a better fix on the ocean floor which will enable a more narrowly focused search.
“If we go down there now and do a visual search it will take many, many days.
“It is painstaking work. The device is literally crawling along the bottom of the ocean.”
He said advice from around the world was that while the black box batteries were certified for 30 days they “usually last longer than that”.
Ships involved in the search are concentrating on a 600km area about 1600km off the WA coast after navy ship Ocean Shield detected two significant signals, one lasting for two hours and 20 minutes.
Houston said yesterday the new underwater signals were consistent with aircraft “black boxes” and that it was the “most promising lead” yet in the month-old hunt for the missing plane.
“I think it’s absolutely imperative to find something else and hopefully when we put the autonomous vehicle down, its capability is such that it’ll be able to find wreckage,” Houston told ABC radio this morning.
The chance of finding debris on the ocean surface was diminishing, especially after a cyclone passed through the search zone, he said.
He said yesterday the acoustics emanating from deep down in the Indian Ocean showed that the multinational search by ships and planes seemed to be “very close to where we need to be”.
The apparent breakthrough comes as the clock ticks past the 30-day lifespan of the emergency beacons of the two data recorders from the Malaysia Airlines jet, which vanished March 8 with 239 people on board en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
– FREE MALAYSIA TODAY
