Australian searchers have detected more signals that are believed to be consistent with those coming from the two black boxes of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Retired Australian Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston told reporters on Monday. This latest development of the plane search comes one day before the first month since the plane went missing, along with 239 people on board.
Houston, who leads the search, said that two sounds were detected by Australian ship Ocean Shield in southern Indian Ocean, where the plane had its last communication. He said the first signal was held for 2 hours and 20 minutes before it got lost. The second one was detected for 13 minutes, when the ship made its return on the area. Nonetheless, the plane has not yet been found.
“On this occasion two distinct pinger returns were audible. Significantly this would be consistent with transmissions from both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder,” ACM Houston said in the press conference, calling the signals as the “most promising lead” in solving the mystery of the lost plane.
“We are now in a very well defined search area, which hopefully will eventually yield the information that we need to say that [Malaysia Airlines flight] MH370 might have entered the water just here.” ACM Houston added, but emphasized that it could take days before they can confirm if those signals really came from the troubled plane.
As of posting, the Ocean Shield is still in the search area and has not heard the signals again, which were heard at a depth of 4,500 meters under the sea. But once the signal is picked up again, the crew is set to launch the Bluefin 21 underwater autonomous submarine to dive deeper to the sea floor, which is estimated to be 14,800 feet deep.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished mysteriously on March 8, as it left Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, bound to Beijing. Since then, officials have no idea on what actually happened. Different theories have surfaced, but up to now, no concrete evidence had been established determining why the plane disappeared.
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