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Wreck hunter confident MH370 crash site found, says Aussie paper

A wreck hunter is confident that the search teams had pinpointed the crash site of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and believes that the black boxes will be located soon, the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) reports.

David Mearns, director of Blue Water Recoveries told the ABC's 7.30 programme yesterday, he was confident that, because of their strength, the four “pings” detected by Australian navy ship Ocean Shield last week were from the black boxes.

"I think essentially they have found the wreckage site," SMH quoted him as saying on the programme.

“While the government hasn't announced that yet, if somebody asked me 'technically do they have enough information to say that?', my answer is unequivocally, yes.

“They have got four very, very good detections with the right spectrum of noise coming from them and it can't be from anything else.”

Mearns, an American, was awarded a medal of the Order of Australia for his work after he found the wreckage of HMAS Sydney in 2008, 66 years after it had been lost in the Indian Ocean during World War 2.

He had also helped find the wreckage of Air France flight 447 in the Atlantic Ocean in 2011, the SMH said.

Mearns said search officials were being cautious for the sake of the families of the passengers and crew on board while they wait for the Bluefin-21 autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to bring back photographic proof of the plane wreckage.

The mini-submarine was deployed again last night from Ocean Shield after nothing of interest was found from the data gathered from its first mission on Monday, a statement from the Joint Agency Coordination Centre in Perth said today.

Each AUV mission takes 16 hours to complete.

The sonar device takes about two hours to descend 4,500m before scanning a 5km by 8km search area. It then returns to the Ocean Shield vessel for a battery change.

Analysing data from the device can take up to four hours.

United States navy Captain Mark Matthews had told Fairfax Media that the Bluefin-21 surveyed a possible debris field and measured the density of the objects to determine if something was silt or metallic, which could indicate jet wreckage.

Once man-made objects are identified, search operators can reprogramme the Bluefin-21 to gather high resolution images.

“You can then swap out sonar system with imaging system, a camera system, to go take pictures of the debris field so you can positively identify that it is aircraft wreckage or something else,” Matthews had said.

He had also said searchers had “a number of positive indications” in the right area, including the four sonar acoustic signals detected and an oil slick found on Monday.

Mearns said the breakthrough in the investigation came with the analysis of the MH370 flight path, which refined the search area.

“Somewhere out of some place, fantastic pieces of intelligence were put together to really narrow that down to a small, small area and that's how these guys have been able to find it so quickly,” he said on the ABC programme.

“The Ocean Shield was only out there a couple of days and they got a hit. So that has been tremendous success and miraculous.”

Up to 11 military aircraft, three civil aircraft and 11 ships will assist in today's search, the JACC said.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority has planned a visual search area totalling approximately 55,151 sq km.

The centre of the search areas lies about 2,000km northwest of Perth. – April 16, 2014.