Ships race to probe signals

MH370 Three separate but fleeting sounds from deep in the Indian Ocean offer hope, to be verified

PERTH: Searchers hunting for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet were racing to a patch of the southern Indian Ocean on Sunday to determine whether a few brief sounds picked up by underwater equipment came from the plane’s black boxes, whose battery-operated beacons are on the verge of dying out.

Ships searching the vast Indian Ocean have detected three separate underwater signals, and more ships and planes were diverted Sunday to investigate whether they could have come from its “black box”.

Angus Houston, head of the Australian search mission, said the detections were being taken “very seriously” as time ticked down on the battery life of the black box’s tracking beacons.

He said China’s Haixun 01 has twice detected an underwater signal on a frequency used for the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders -- once for 90 seconds on Saturday and another more fleeting “ping” on Friday a short distance away.

A third “ping” was also being scrutinised, 300 nautical miles away in the Indian Ocean.

The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 with 239 people aboard vanished on March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

“Speculation can see the loved ones of the passengers put through terrible stress and I don’t want to put them under any further emotional distress,” he said.

Britain’s HMS Echo and the Australian ship Ocean Shield and Australian air force planes were being diverted to the area to help discount or confirm the signals.

Meanwhile, a media report said the plane flew around Indonesian airspace apparently to avoid detection after vanishing from radar screens on March 8, suggesting the possibility of a more sinister reason behind the jet’s disappearance.

The latest finding added to the already prevailing assumption that the plane was flown deliberately along a route designed to avoid radar detection. But so far investigators have not ruled out other possible causes of the plane’s diversion, such as mechanical problems.

Later on Sunday, husband of one of the five Indians on board the ill-fated plane demanded that authorities probing themysterious disappearance of the Malaysian jet nearly a month ago must get to the bottom of it so that people feel safe every time they board a flight.