A high-tech Australian ship has detected signals consistent with aircraft black boxes in the northern part of the area being searched for missing flight MH370, it was revealed today.
The major development was announced by Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, the co-ordinator of the search from Perth, who said that ‘this is the most promising lead, probably, in the search so far. It’s probably the best information we’ve had.’
The signals were detected by a 'towed pinger locator' deployed by the Australian vessel Ocean Shield in the northern part of the defined search area west of Australia.
Mr Houston said the signals were consistent with those emitted by aircraft black boxes, adding that the first was held for than two hours and 20 minutes, the second for about 13 minutes.
'On this occasion, two distinct pinger returns were audible' and both would be consistent with transmissions from the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder,' he told reporters in Perth.
But Mr Houston stressed that 'we haven't found the aircraft yet,' pointing out that further confirmation was needed. 'The area in which the signals have been received has a depth of approximately 4,500m,' he said, adding this was 'the limit of capability' of an underwater search vehicle.
Today Malaysian acting transport minister Hishammudin Hussein told reporters that in light of the new information: 'We are cautiously hopeful that there will be a positive development in the next few days, if not hours.'
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| THE VESSEL THAT DETECTED THE PING |
Mr Hussein said miracles do happen' and that 'we continue to pray for survivors'. He said that all parties must be cautious about 'unconfirmed findings and making conclusions'.
The dramatic developments came a day after batteries on the aircraft's two black boxes were expected to die after emitting signals for a month. 'We're already one day past the advertised shelf life,' Mr Houston said.
'We hope that it keeps going for a little bit longer.'
He said it could take days to locate the wreckage, despite narrowing the search area down.
'We're very focused at the moment into exhausting the investigation into that source and that's going to take a considerable amount of time,' he said.
'When that's finished the next thing is if we can find the location, we need to send the underwater vehicle straight down. If we are unable to fix the location, the people out there have to make an assessment on whether to deploy the underwater vehicle in the most likely area.
'I would anticipate that is most likely to happen. We are talking a long operation here which could be measured in months.' 'Things happen very slowly at the depths we are dealing with...we've not seen any wreckage at all yet.'
Meanwhile the British navy ship HMS Echo has entered the zone where the Chinese patrol vessel Haixun 01 picked up two underwater signals just over a mile apart.
A new report suggesting that the missing flight MH370 deliberately circled around Indonesian air space after it vanished appears to lend credibility to an earlier claim that the jet was hijacked.
CNN reported that it had been told that the Boeing 777 might have flown around Indonesian air space on the night it vanished in what could have been a deliberate attempt to avoid radar detection.
That new report tends to support an anonymous email received by the Daily Mail last week - from what is believed to be a Malaysian government source - in which it was claimed that the aircraft had been hijacked and the pilots were told to circle around an area 'near Malaysia' while negotiations with the hijackers were carried out.
According to the email received by the Mail the hijackers demanded that a five year jail sentence imposed on Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim be lifted - and while negotiations were being carried out the plane was ordered to fly around near Malaysia and Indonesia for five hours.
Although the email cannot be verified and the claimed government source has not been identified, its contents tend to fit in with separate information now received by CNN.
The writer, who corresponded in Chinese, said in the translation that if an agreement was reached for the jail sentence to be lifted, the aircraft would be allowed to land safely.
But if, after five hours no agreement was reached, 'the plane will be destroyed'.
The source said in the email that although the aircraft's main communication system had been closed down, negotiations continued through what the writer said was an 'internal communication channel.'
According to the source, the government took five hours to declare the loss of the plane because that was when the negotiation time ran out and when officials realised the aircraft could not stay in the air any longer.
During those five hours, said the writer, 'the plane was always flying around the Malaysian area.' The Boeing company said later that the jet would have been able to stay in the air for a few hours more than the five hours referred to in the email.
Although both the CNN report and the email received by the Mail have come from unidentified sources, the claims in both tend to agree on one major point - that MH370 circled around the Malaysian-Indonesian area before, as pings from the bottom of the sea suggest, it finally flew out into the Indian Ocean where it ran out of fuel.
The discovery has come at the last possible moment - 30 days, 4 hours and 8 minutes after the last communications from MH370 were detected by air traffic control authorities on March 8. If a pinger signal was not located today, there was a good chance it would not be located at all.
Some of the world's most technologically advanced ocean ships descended on two remote spots in the southern Indian Ocean where 'pings' were detected Saturday and Sunday that were believed to have come from the elusive flight MH370.
The world is holding its collective breathe as the the British naval vessel HMS Echo searches the area where two pulses were detected by China's Haixun 01 on Saturday.
As time ticks away on the month-long battery life of the Boeing 777's black box, Australia's Ocean Shield has diverted to where it detected a separate ping on Sunday.
The three 'fleeting sounds' have been picked up in the multi-national search currently being conducted 1,000 miles off Australia's west coast.
At least one of those 'pings' is believed to have a similar frequency to that given off by a black box\
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HMS Echo, one of Britain's most sophisticated hydrographic vessels, is racing against time to determine whether the sounds were signals from the plane's black box as the batteries powering the device are expected to run out in the next few days.
But first it will have to conduct an 'environmental search' to differentiate between the ocean's sounds and the potential finding.
Australia's HMS Ocean Shield is also in the vicinity carrying cutting-edge American sound detection technology, investigating a third sound detected nearby.
Over a dozen planes and around 12 planes were slated to take part in the search of three areas where pings have been detected which total around 83,400 square miles.
Three separate sounds were recorded 5.6 miles deep in the southern Indian Ocean today. The finding, more than a month after the plane went missing, has been tipped as an 'important and encouraging' lead.
Two of the pings were detected by Chinese vessel Haixun 01 within a small patch of the 84,000-square-mile search zone. A third 'acoustic event' was picked up in a different area by an Australian ship, officials said.
Those leading the search for the plane are insisting the detection of the sounds 'does not confirm or deny the presence of the aircraft locator on the bottom of the ocean.'
The news comes as new details emerge which suggest the movements of every passenger and crew member aboard the ill-fated flight have been examined by detectives sifting through CCTV cameras mounted at the airport and on the nearby motorway.
Australian Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston today confirmed a Chinese ship had picked up electronic pulsing signals twice in a small patch of the search zone, once on Friday and again on Saturday.
On Sunday, the Australian HMS Ocean Shield carrying sophisticated deep-sea sound equipment picked up a third signal some 345 miles away.
Mr Houston told reporters in Perth: 'This is an important and encouraging lead, but one which I urge you to treat carefully.'
He stressed the signals had not been verified as linked to the plane - which was travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board.
'We have an acoustic event. The job now is to determine the significance of that event.
'It does not confirm or deny the presence of the aircraft locator on the bottom of the ocean,' Houston said.
China's official Xinhua News Agency reported late Saturday the patrol vessel Haixun 01 detected a 'pulse signal' at 37.5 kilohertz (cycles per second) on Friday.
This is the same frequency emitted by flight data recorders aboard the missing plane.
Houston confirmed the report adding the vessel detected a signal again on Saturday within 1.4 miles of the original signal. That signal was heard for 90 seconds.
He said that China also reported seeing white objects floating in the sea 55 miles from where the ping was detected.
Houston said the British navy's HMS Echo, which is fitted with sophisticated sound locating equipment, was moving immediately to the area where the signals were picked up. He said they would arrive in the next day or two.
The Australian navy's Ocean Shield, which is carrying high-tech sound detectors from the U.S. Navy, will also head there, but would first investigate the sound it picked up in its current region, about 300 nautical miles away, he said.
He said Australian air force assets were also being deployed on Sunday into the Haixun 01's area to try to confirm or discount the signals relevance to the search.
After weeks of fruitless looking, the multinational search team is racing against time to find the sound-emitting beacons and cockpit voice recorders that could help unravel the mystery of the plane.
The beacons in the black boxes emit 'pings' so they can be more easily found, but the batteries only last for about a month.
The movements of every passenger and crew member in the hours before the ill-fated MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur have been examined by detectives sifting through CCTV cameras mounted at the airport and on the nearby motorway.
They have examined the faces of passengers and crew passing through an automatic toll point near the airport and have watched security footage of all passengers as they strolled around the airport prior to taking off on the scheduled flight to Beijing.
The examinations has been so detailed that detectives have been able to follow the movements of two Iranians who, it was established later, had checked in using passports stolen in Thailand.
While background checks on the two men suggest they were planning to start new lives in Europe, using a popular 'human smuggling route' through Malaysia, their movements might suggest they were up to more sinister activities.
Investigators combing through the CCTV recordings first spotted the two men passing through a toll gate in separate vehicles, the Sunday edition of Malaysia's New Straits Times reported today.
One was travelling in a taxi while the other was travelling in a private car, a source was quoted as telling the newspaper. The cars stopped near each other at the airport and then the two men walked in the same direction, but separately.
'They were trying hard to appear as if they didn't know each other at the airport. It was only much later that they pretended to bump into each other and shook hands, but after that they again kept a distance from each other. They were very calm throughout,' said the quoted source.
The source told the paper: 'Their hands were glued to their phones, texting non-stop...it appeared as though they were taking instructions from someone.'
The source added that based on intelligence gathered, there was nothing suspicious that could link them to the plane going missing.
According to the paper, investigators have sifted through hundreds of closed-circuit footage and had been able to record the movements of all those who boarded the plane from gate C1, in the West Zone of the airport's Satellite Building.
Investigators believe Flight 370 veered way off course and came down somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, though they have not been able to explain why it did so.
The Chinese crew reportedly picked up the signals using a hand-held sonar device called a hydrophone dangled over the side of a small runabout - something experts said was technically possible but extremely unlikely.
The equipment aboard the Ocean Shield and the HMS Echo are dragged slowly behind each ship over long distances and are considered far more sophisticated than those the Chinese crew was using.
Footage aired on China's state-run CCTV showed crew members in the small boat with a device shaped like a large soup can attached to a pole.
It was hooked up by cords to electronic equipment in a padded suitcase as they poked the device into the water.
'If the Chinese have discovered this, they have found a new way of finding a needle in a haystack,' said aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas, editor-in-chief of AirlineRatings.com.
'Because this is amazing. And if it proves to be correct, it's an extraordinarily lucky break.'
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