Australia Says Signals Detected Consistent with Missing Malaysian Plane
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - Australian officials said on Monday signals picked up by a black box detector attached to an Australian ship searching for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in the Indian Ocean were consistent with aircraft flight recorders.
"Clearly, this is a most promising lead," Angus Houston, head of the Australian agency coordinating the search, told a news conference in Perth in western Australia.
Houston, a retired air chief marshal, said two signals had been detected off Australia's northwest coast, Reuters reported.
The first detection held for 2.5 hours before the ship lost contact. After turning around, the ship picked up the signal for around 13 minutes, he said.
"On this occasion two distinct pinger returns were audible," Houston said. "Significantly, this would be consistent with transmissions from both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder."
Confirmation of whether the signals were emitted from the Kuala Lumpur-to-Beijing bound plane, missing since March 8 with 239 people on board, could take several days, Houston said.
The black boxes, thought be to lying on the ocean floor, are equipped with locator beacons that send pings but the beacons' batteries are thought to be running out of charge by now, a month after Flight MH370 disappeared.
