Officials from Australia announced on Monday, April 7, 2014 that they managed to pick up a few signals by a black box detector which is attached to an Australian ship looking for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in the Indian Ocean. The officials said that the signals were consistent with aircraft flight recorders.
The Head of the Australian agency in charge of the search, Angus Houston during a news conference said , “Clearly, this is a most promising lead”. Houston went on to say that two signals have been detected off the northwest coast of Australia. It was reported that the first detection was held for about 2.5 hours before contact was lost. After the ship turned around, they managed to pick up the signal for approximately 13 minutes.
Houston also said that on this occasion, two distinct pinger returns were heard. The official also said that this can be consistent with transmissions from the flight data recorder as well as the cockpit voice recorder. Houston also said that in order to confirm if the signals were emitted from the plane flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, it could take a few days.
The black boxes are expected to be lying on the ocean floor and are equipped with locator beacons which send pings, but the batteries of beacons are likely to be running out of charge, as a lot of time has passed already.
Photo Credits: SBS
