An Australian ship which picked up possible “pings” from the black box recorders of a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner has been unable to detect any further signals and time is running out to narrow the massive search, officials said today.
Angus Houston, head of the Australian agency coordinating the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, said the month-long hunt in the Indian Ocean was at a critical stage given the batteries in the black box beacons had already reached the end of their 30-day expected life.
AUS Navy “towed pinger locator” onboard Australia’s Ocean Shield picked up two “ping” signal detections over the weekend – the first for more than two hours and the second for about 13 minutes.
Mr Houston said the signals sounded very much like black box beacons and represented the best lead in the search yet, but efforts to pick up the pings again had so far been unsuccessful.
“If we don’t get any further transmissions, we have a reasonably large search area of the bottom of the ocean to prosecute and that will take a long, long time. It’s very slow, painstaking work,” said Mr Houston.
