Fresh signal detected today in search for flight MH370
Another
signal has been detected today in the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, The Sydney Morning Herald has reported, quoting the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC).
Angus Houston, who is heading the JACC out of Perth in Western Australia, said that the fresh signal was picked up this afternoon by an Australian Air Force P-3C Orion plane somewhere near the Australian Defence vessel HMAS Ocean Shield.
The plane had detected the possible signal from the sonar buoys that are equipped to home in on underwater locator beacons built into the commercial aircraft's black box.
“The acoustic data will require further analysis overnight but shows potential of being from a man-made source,” the former Australian defence chief said in a statement, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
He added: “I will provide a further update if, and when, further information becomes available.”
This latest development comes following the addition of sonar buoys to the search efforts by the JACC earlier today.
A Royal Australian Air Force P-3C Orion surveillance plane had deployed the sonar buoys (sonobuoys) in the smaller search area to assist the US Navy listening device that detected the signals.
Each of the 84 sonobuoys is equipped with a listening device called a hydrophone, which is dangled about 305 metres below the surface and is capable of transmitting data to search aircraft via radio signals.
Houston was also reported to have said that it could be up to 20 days before the search moves to the ocean floor.
"I never put a couple of days on it, I think that the transition to the underwater effort will require a number of days before there's any prospect of finding anything," the Sydney Morning Herald quoted him as saying.
"It could be up to 20 days, hopefully it will be far less than that, if we get lucky it might be, but on the other hand the conditions down there could be very demanding with all the silt and so on and we may have problems that we haven't anticipated.
"It will be a long, painstaking process and it will be very demanding because it's very deep and very dark down there, and we only have the one vehicle at this stage to do that work at those extreme depths," he added.
Up to 10 military aircraft, four civil aircraft and 13 ships were involved today with a massive search effort that has so far proven fruitless in identifying any physical evidence of wreckage from the flight.
According to CNN, the JACC said that various aircraft and ships spotted a number of objects during search operations yesterday, but could recover only a small number, none of which appeared linked to MH370.
Efforts are now focused on two areas – a larger one for aircraft and ships about 2,240km northwest of Perth and a smaller area about 600km closer to that city.
The latest search area is about three quarters of the size of the area that teams combed the day before and far smaller than what it was a few weeks ago.
Thursday's underwater search area was bracketed by the Ocean Shield at the northern end of the search area and the Chinese ship Haixun 01 and HMS Echo at the southern end.
MAS flight MH370, with 227 passengers and 12 crew on board, disappeared from radar detection in the early hours of March 8, after departing the Kuala Lumpur International Airport en route to Beijing at 12.40am. The flight was scheduled to arrive in Beijing at 6.30am the same day.
The search for the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 aircraft is the longest in modern passenger-airline history. The previous record was the 10-day search for a Boeing 737-400 operated by Indonesia’s PT Adam Skyconnection Airlines, which went missing off the coast of that country’s Sulawesi island January 1, 2007. – April 10, 2014.
