Abbott ‘confident’ signals from black boxes
Print Edition
AUTHORITIES are confident that signals detected deep in the Indian Ocean are from the missing Malaysian airline’s black box, Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott said yesterday, raising hopes they are close to solving one of aviation’s most perplexing mysteries.
Crews hunting for flight 370 have zeroed in on the source of the sounds that were first heard last Saturday, Abbott said in Shanghai.
“We have very much narrowed down the search area and are very confident the signals we are detecting are from the black box on MH370,” he said.
“Nevertheless, we’re getting to the stage where the signal is starting to fade. We are hoping to get as much information as we can before the signal expires,” he said.
The plane’s black box, or flight data and cockpit voice recorders, might hold the answers to why the Boeing 777 lost communications and veered so far off course when it vanished on March 8 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.
Search crews are racing against time because the batteries powering the devices’ locator beacons last only about a month, and more than a month has passed since the plane disappeared. Finding the black box after the batteries fail will be extremely difficult because the water in the area is 4,500 meters deep.
The Australian ship Ocean Shield is towing a US Navy device that detects black box signals, and two sounds it heard last Saturday were determined to be consistent with the signals emitted from aircraft flight recorders. Two more sounds were detected in the same general area on Tuesday.
“We are confident that we know the position of the black box flight recorder to within some kilometers,” Abbott said.
“But confidence in the approximate position of the black box is not the same as recovering wreckage from almost 4 kilometers beneath the sea or finally determining all that happened on that flight.”
Abbott also met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing yesterday and briefed him on the search. Two-thirds of the passengers aboard flight 370 were Chinese.
“This will be a very long, slow and painstaking process,” Abbott told Xi.
Xi thanked Abbott for Australia’s efforts to search for the missing flight, and Abbott expressed appreciation for China’s involvement, Xinhua news agency reported.
An Australian air force P-3 Orion, which has been dropping sonar buoys into the water near where the Ocean Shield picked up the sounds, detected another possible signal on Thursday.
But Angus Houston, who is coordinating the search, said that an initial assessment had determined it was not related to an aircraft black box.
The buoys have a hydrophone listening device that dangles about 300m below the surface and their data are sent via radio back to a plane, Royal Australian Navy Commodore Peter Leavy said.
The Ocean Shield was still towing its pinger locator yesterday, and the Orions were continuing their hunt, Houston said. The underwater search zone is a 1,300-square-kilometer patch of the ocean floor.
“It is vital to glean as much information as possible while the batteries on the underwater locator beacons may still be active,” Houston said.
Searchers are trying to pinpoint the exact location of the signals so they can send down a robotic submersible, but Houston said yesterday that a decision to send the sub could be “some days away.”
Meanwhile, Houston said the surface area to be searched for floating debris had been narrowed to 46,713 square kilometers of ocean extending from 2,300km northwest of Perth. Up to 15 planes and 13 ships were conducting a visual search yesterday, west of the underwater search based on expected drift from the suspected crash site.
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