International
Australian Transport Safety Bureau
After a navy ship heard more signals from deep in the Indian Ocean, the head of the search for the missing Malaysian jetliner said Wednesday he believes the hunt is closing in on the "final resting place" of Flight 370.
The Australian vessel Ocean Shield picked up two signals Tuesday, and an analysis of two other sounds detected Saturday showed they were consistent with a plane's flight recorders, or "black boxes," said Angus Houston, the Australian official coordinating the search for the Malaysian Airlines jet.
"I'm now optimistic that we will find the aircraft, or what is left of the aircraft, in the not-too-distant future," Houston said. "But we haven't found it yet, because this is a very challenging business."
The Ocean Shield first detected the sounds late Saturday and early Sunday before losing them, but managed to find them again on Tuesday, Houston said. The ship is equipped with a U.S. Navy towed pinger locator that is designed to pick up signals from a plane's black boxes — the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.
"I would just like to have that hard evidence ... photograph evidence [before saying] that this is the final resting place of MH370," Houston said.
Finding the sound again is crucial to narrowing the search area so a small submarine can be deployed to chart a potential debris field on the seafloor. If the autonomous sub were used now with the sparse data collected so far, covering all the potential places from which the pings might have come would take many days.
"The better Ocean Shield can define the area, the easier it will be for the autonomous underwater vehicle to subsequently search for aircraft wreckage," Houston said.
The locator beacons on the black boxes have a battery life of only about a month. Once the beacons blink off, locating the black boxes in such deep water would be an immensely difficult, if not impossible, task.
Tuesday marks one month since the plane vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people on board — setting off an international search that started off the southern coast of Vietnam and then shifted to the southern Indian Ocean as information from radar and satellite data was refined.
Family members of passengers on board the flight held a candlelight vigil in Beijing on Tuesday to mark how long it has been since contact with the plane was lost. About two-thirds of people on board were Chinese.
"We've been waiting and holding on here for already 31 days," said Steve Wang, one of the relatives.
"Don't cry anymore. Don't hurt anymore. Don't despair. Don't feel lost," he counseled others who gathered for the vigil.
The length of the search and lack of any information about why the plane went so far off course has transfixed the world.
Al Jazeera and wire services
The disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines plane is a lesson in the limits of technology — and the public’s patience
Authorities say missing plane may never be found; focus shifts to pilots and crew, while passengers cleared of foul play
Early possible clues and explanations, including oil slicks, wreckage and battery failure, haven't helped find the plane
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