Malaysia Plane Hunt Resumes amidst Optimism over 'Pings'
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - The search for a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner resumed on Thursday with a renewed sense of optimism, after Australian officials said they had detected two new "ping" signals that may have come from the plane's black box recorders.
The mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which disappeared more than a month ago, has sparked the most expensive search and rescue operation in aviation history, but concrete information has proven frustratingly illusive.
The announcement on Wednesday that two new "ping" signals had been detected, bringing to four the number heard by a U.S. Navy "Towed Pinger Locator"(TPL), led officials to say they were confident that they were homing in on the remains of the plane.
"We are still a long way to go, but things are more positive than they were some time ago," Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Board, which is involved in the search mission, told Reuters on Thursday.
The black boxes record cockpit data and may provide answers about what happened to the plane, which was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew when it vanished on March 8 and flew thousands of kilometers off its Kuala Lumpur-to-Beijing route, Reuters reported.
But the batteries in the black boxes have already reached the end of their 30-day expected life, making efforts to swiftly locate them on the murky ocean floor all the more critical.
are expected to be involved on Thursday with a massive search effort that has so far proven fruitless in identifying any physical evidence of wreckage from the flight.
Efforts are now focused on two areas - a larger one for aircraft and ships about 2,240 kms (1,392 miles) northwest of Perth and a smaller area about 600 kms (373 miles) closer to that city.
