The hunt for more black box “pings” from missing Malaysian airliner MH370 narrowed on Thursday to a specific patch of remote ocean after the logging of fresh signals raised hopes wreckage will soon be found.
With dying batteries after more than a month since the Boeing 777 vanished, the head of the Australian-led search Angus Houston wants to pursue the listening operation to help pinpoint the plane’s exact location before sending down a submersible.
Houston’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) announced Thursday the search area off western Australia was now 57,923 square kilometres (22,364 square miles) — compared to more than 220,000 sq kms previously and 75,000 sq kms on Wednesday.
But Australian ship Ocean Shield is focused on a far smaller area of the Indian Ocean 2,280 kilometres (1,400 miles) northwest of Perth where it picked up two fresh signals Tuesday. They matched a pair of transmissions logged over the weekend.
“When you put those two (sets of pings) together, it makes us very optimistic,” US Seventh fleet spokesman commander William Marks said Thursday, adding that the search was getting “closer and closer”.
“This is not something you find with commercial shipping, not something just found in nature, this is definitely something that is man-made, consistent with what you would find with these black boxes.”
“So we are looking pretty good now.”
He told he expected the pings to last “maybe another day or two”.
No debris from the aircraft which disappeared on March 8 has yet been found although a large number of objects were spotted on the surface on Wednesday, JACC said.
“But only a small number were able to be recovered. None of the recovered items were believed to be associated with MH370.”
Officials had feared that the signals which were initially picked up might not be detected again, particularly since the batteries on the black box tracking beacons have a normal lifespan of about 30 days.
“Yesterday’s signals will assist in better defining a reduced and much more manageable search area on the ocean floor,” Houston said Wednesday.
“I believe we are searching in the right area but we need to visually identify the aircraft before we can confirm with certainty that this is the final resting place of MH370.”
Houston, however, again urged caution for the sake of the families of those aboard the flight which mysteriously vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, and said the search for more signals would go on.
“Hopefully with lots of transmissions we’ll have a tight, small area and… in a matter of days we’ll be able to find something on the bottom,” he said.
