Perth: Multinational search teams on Sunday rushed ships with high-tech equipment to the area in southern Indian Ocean where a Chinese vessel detected “encouraging lead” of electronic pulse signals possibly linked to the black box of the missing Malaysian jet.
Two naval ships carrying sophisticated deep-sea black box detectors are being sent to the area off western Australia where the pulses were reported to try to confirm or rule out whether they were from the missing plane’s flight recorders, Retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston told reporters.
“This is an important and encouraging lead,” said Houston, the head of the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) which is leading the search. Reports overnight that a black box detector deployed by Chinese patrol ship Haixun 01 has detected electronic pulse signals in the Indian Ocean related to MH370 “cannot be verified at this point in time”, the JACC said in a statement.
The Chinese ship yesterday detected a pulse signal with a frequency of 37.5kHz per second in southern Indian Ocean. The black box detector deployed by the ship picked up the signal at around 25 degrees south Latitude and 101 degrees east Longitude.
Also on Saturday, a Chinese air force plane spotted a number of white floating objects in the search area.
The plane photographed the objects over a period of 20 minutes after spotting them at 11:05 local time.
The detection has been reported to the JACC. Some 10 military planes, two civil jets and 13 ships will look for any trace of flight MH370 aided by good weather with a cloud base of 2,500 feet and visibility greater than 10 km, according to the Joint Agency Coordination Center coordinating the operations.
The search area is approximately 216,000 square km, about 2,000 km northwest of Perth. It is about 300 km farther from the western coastal city than the area searched on the day before.
The Beijing-bound Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 – carrying 239 people, including five Indians, an Indo-Canadian and 154 Chinese nationals – had mysteriously vanished on March 8 after taking off from Kuala Lumpur.
The mystery of the missing plane continued to baffle aviation and security authorities who have so far not succeeded in tracking the aircraft despite deploying hi-tech radar and other gadgets. (PTI)
