Experts determine significance of ‘acoustic event’
Print Edition
THREE separate but fleeting sounds from deep in the Indian Ocean offered new hope yesterday in the hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet as officials rushed to determine whether they were signals from the plane’s black boxes before their beacons fall silent.
The head of the multinational search being conducted off Australia’s west coast confirmed that a Chinese ship had picked up electronic pulsing signals twice in a small patch of the search zone, once on Friday and again on Saturday.
Yesterday, an Australian ship carrying sophisticated deep-sea sound equipment picked up a third signal in a different part of the massive search area.
“This is an important and encouraging lead, but one which I urge you to treat carefully,” retired Australian Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston, who is coordinating the search, told reporters.
He stressed that the signals had not been verified as linked to flight MH370.
Experts, meanwhile, have expressed doubts that the equipment being used on the Chinese ship could be capable of picking up signals from the black boxes.
“We have an acoustic event. The job now is to determine the significance of that event. It does not confirm or deny the presence of the aircraft locator on the bottom of the ocean,” Houston said, referring to each of the three transmissions.
“We are dealing with very deep water, we are dealing with an environment where sometimes you can get false indications,” he said. “There are lots of noises in the ocean, and sometimes the acoustic equipment can rebound, echo if you like.”
On Saturday, Xinhua news agency reported that Chinese patrol vessel Haixun 01 detected a “pulse signal” on Friday in the southern Indian Ocean at 37.5 kilohertz — the same frequency emitted by the flight data recorders on the missing plane.
Houston confirmed the report, and said the Haixun 01 detected a signal again on Saturday within 2 kilometers of the original signal, for 90 seconds. He said China also reported seeing white objects floating in the area.
British navy ship HMS Echo, which is fitted with sophisticated sound-locating equipment, is moving to the area where the signals were picked up and was due to arrive there early today.
The Australian navy’s Ocean Shield, which is carrying high-tech sound detectors from the US Navy, will also head there, but will first investigate the sound it picked up in its current region, about 555 kilometers away, he said.
Australian air force assets are also being deployed to the Haixun 01’s area to try to confirm or discount the signals’ relevance to the search, Houston said.
After weeks of fruitless looking, the multinational search team is racing against time to find the sound-emitting beacons and cockpit voice recorders that could help unravel the mystery. The beacons in the black boxes emit “pings” so they can be more easily found, but the batteries only last for about a month.
Investigators believe the plane veered way off-course and came down somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, though they have not been able to explain why.
The crew of the Chinese ship reportedly picked up the signals using a hand-held sonar device called a hydrophone dangled over the side of a small runabout — something experts said was technically possible but extremely unlikely.
More sophisticated
The equipment on the Ocean Shield and HMS Echo is dragged slowly behind each ship over long distances and is considered far more sophisticated than the device used by the Chinese crew.
TV footage showed them with a device shaped like a large soup can attached to a pole.
It was hooked up to electronic equipment in a padded suitcase as they poked the device into the water.
“If the Chinese have discovered this, they have found a new way of finding a needle in a haystack,” said aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas, editor-in-chief of AirlineRatings.com. “Because this is amazing. And if it proves to be correct, it’s an extraordinarily lucky break.”
There are many clicks, buzzes and other sounds in the ocean from animals, but a 37.5 kilohertz pulse was selected for underwater locator beacons because there is nothing else in the sea that would naturally make that sound, said William Waldock, a US search and rescue expert.
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