(Bloomberg) — A Chinese ship hunting for the missing Malaysian jet detected a second, longer unidentified pulse signal as an international fleet races against time to locate the plane before its black-box batteries run out.
The Haixun 01 detected the second signal for 90 seconds late yesterday afternoon, about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from where a pulse was noticed the previous night, retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, head of Australia's Joint Agency Coordination Centre, said today. The U.K.'s HMS Echo and Australian defense vessel Ocean Shield are being directed to the area, where the water is about 4.5 kilometers deep, he said.
"The fact that we've had two detections, two acoustic events in that location, provides some promise," Houston said at a press briefing in Perth. "We're running out of time in terms of the battery life on the emergency locator beacon."
The Haixun 01 had detected a pulse with a frequency of 37.5 kilohertz while searching in the southern Indian Ocean, China's official Xinhua News Agency said yesterday. While black-box locator beacons transmit at that frequency, the signal hasn't been confirmed as related to the missing Malaysian Airline System Bhd. jet, the news service reported, citing the China Maritime Search and Rescue Center.
Locating the cockpit and flight-data recorders is crucial to unraveling the mystery that began March 8 when contact was lost with Flight 370. No trace of the plane carrying 239 people has been found since. The challenge is in narrowing the search zone to get close enough to hear pings as the boxes' batteries near the end of a lifespan of about 30 days.
Information request
As many as 12 planes and 13 ships are searching for wreckage today, the JACC said in a statement. The search is focused on three areas within a broader patrol zone of about 216,000 square kilometers (83,400 square miles), 2,000 kilometers northwest of Perth, it said. The priority is in the southern part of the search area after a correction to satellite data, Houston said today.
"We are working in a very big ocean and within a very large search area and so far, since the aircraft went missing, we have had very few leads which allow us to narrow the search area," he said. Echo is the closest vessel, while the Ocean Shield may be delayed in reaching the Haixun 01 as it investigates an acoustic noise in its current location, he said.
Flight 370, a Boeing Co. 777-200ER, was deliberately steered off its flight path to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur and onto a course that ended in the southern Indian Ocean, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has said.
Scouring ships
Investigators have relied on the limited contact between Flight 370 and an Inmarsat Plc satellite to draw up possible paths for the jetliner after it vanished from civilian radar. Planes and ships from Australia, Malaysia, China, the U.S., South Korea, New Zealand and Japan are taking part in the hunt, the longest in modern passenger-airline history between a disappearance and initial findings of debris.
The Echo, launched in 2002, can collect military hydrographic and oceanographic data and carries a detachment of marines, according to the British navy's website. British nuclear submarine HMS Tireless has also joined the search.
Orange boxes
Black boxes are actually a bright-orange color to help locate them in wreckage. While designed to operate at depths of 3.8 miles, the range of the beacons' pings is a mile, according to manuals from Honeywell International Inc., the maker of the equipment. That may make the signals hard to detect even if an underwater microphone is over the correct location.
Hearing the transmitters, or pingers, can be difficult too if they are blocked by undersea mountains. Layers of water with different temperatures can also reduce sounds. The underwater locator beacon transmits at a frequency of 37.5 kHz a second, according to a document posted on the website of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.
In the search for wreckage of Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Brazil in 2009, authorities were able to focus on a 6,700-square-mile area after finding objects adrift five days following the crash. They also had a last known position and four minutes of signals from a messaging system dubbed Acars, which was shut off on Flight 370.
Even with those clues, the pings from Flight 447's recorders weren't picked up. It took two voyages over almost a two-year period to find the debris field with unmanned underwater vehicles.
Malaysia will appoint an independent investigator to lead the team searching for the missing jet, Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said yesterday at a press briefing in Kuala Lumpur. Australia has accepted Malaysia's invitation to be accredited to the team, and representatives from China, the U.S., U.K. and France will also be included, he said.
The Malaysian government has set up three ministerial committees to aid the search efforts, including one that will provide information and support to family members of those on the plane, according to Hishammuddin.
With assistance from Edward Johnson in Sydney, John Walcott in Washington and Shamim Adam in Singapore.
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