New signal detected in hunt for missing Malaysian Airlines jet

An Australian aircraft picked up a new underwater signal on Thursday while searching the same part of the Indian Ocean where earlier sounds were detected that were consistent with an aircraft’s black boxes. The Australian navy P-3 Orion, which has been dropping sound-locating buoys into the water near where the original sounds were heard, picked up a ‘possible signal’ that may be from a man-made source, said Angus Houston, who is coordinating the search off Australia’s west coast.

‘The acoustic data will require further analysis overnight,’ Houston said in a statement. If confirmed, this would be the fifth underwater signal detected in the hunt for Flight 370, which vanished on March 8 while flying from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, with 239 people aboard.

On Tuesday, the Australian vessel Ocean Shield picked up two underwater sounds, and an analysis of two other sounds detected in the same general area on Saturday showed they were consistent with a plane’s flight recorders, or ‘black boxes.’ The Australian navy has been dropping buoys from a P-3 Orion to better pinpoint the location of the sounds detected by the Ocean Shield.

Royal Australian navy commodore Peter Leavy said each buoy is dangling a hydrophone listening device about 300 meters (1,000 feet) below the surface. Each buoy transmits its data via radio back to the plane. The underwater search zone is currently a 1,300 square kilometre (500 square mile) patch of the ocean floor, and narrowing the area as small as possible is crucial before an unmanned submarine can be sent to create a sonar map of a potential debris field on the seabed.

The Bluefin 21 sub takes six times longer to cover the same area as the pinger locator being towed by the Ocean Shield, and it would take the vehicle about six weeks to two months to canvass the underwater search zone, which is about the size of Los Angeles. That’s why the acoustic equipment is still being used to hone in on a more precise location, US navy Capt Mark Matthews said.

The search for floating debris on the ocean surface was narrowed on Thursday to its smallest size yet — 57,900 square kilometers (22,300 square miles), or about one-quarter the size it was a few days ago. Fourteen planes and 13 ships were looking for floating debris, about 2,300 kilometers (1,400 miles) northwest of Perth. A ‘large number of objects’ were spotted on Wednesday, but the few that had been retrieved by search vessels were not believed to be related to the missing plane, the search coordination centre said.

Crews hunting for debris on the surface have already looked in the area they were crisscrossing on Thursday, but were moving in tighter patterns, now that the search zone has been narrowed to about a quarter the size it was a few days ago, Houston said.

Houston has expressed optimism about the sounds detected earlier in the week, saying on Wednesday that he was hopeful crews would find the aircraft, or what’s left of it, in the ‘not-too-distant future.’The locator beacons on the black boxes holding the flight data and cockpit voice recorders have a battery life of about a month, and Tuesday marked one month since Flight 370 disappeared.