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  • Missing Flight 370 Black Box Hunted by British Ship

    British Navy ship HMS Echo arrived Sunday in the area in the southern Indian Ocean where a Chinese ship detected “pulse signals” that could be from the black box of the Malaysian Boeing 777-200 jet that has been missing since March 8.

    The HMS Echo, deployed to where the crew of the Chinese vessel Jaixun 01 detected pulses last week, is “capable of collecting an array of military hydrographic and oceanographic data,” according to Britain’s Ministry of Defense.

     The Australian Navy’s Ocean Shield, which is carrying high-tech sound detectors from the U.S. Navy, will first investigate also deploy to the location, but will first investigate other sounds it picked up 300 nautical miles away from the Chinese ship.

    Flight 370 disappeared from radar and broke all communication during a trip from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people on board on March 8.

    Crews are racing to recover the aircraft’s black box. No signal has been detected from the box since last week, and searchers fear the box’s battery may be dead. Black boxes hold flight data and emit signals so that they can easily be found, but the battery typically lasts only about a month.

    “We’re now into Day 37 of this tragedy,” said aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas on Sunday.

    “The battery life on the beacons is supposed to last 30 days. We’re hoping it might last 40 days. However, it’s been four or five days since the last strong pings. What they’re hoping for is to get one more, maybe two more pings so they can do a triangulation of the sounds and try and narrow the (search) area.”

    Despite having no new transmissions from the black boxes to track, air and sea crews continued their search on Sunday for debris and any sounds that may be emanating from the boxes.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Ship Searching for Malaysia Jet Detects Black Box “Ping”

    Ship Searching for Malaysia Jet Detects Black Box “Ping”

    A new development in the search for the missing Malaysian Flight 370 has the search teams excited, and might just give the rest of the world answers in the very near future.

    A Chinese ship has detected signals from a location in the South Indian Ocean, according to reports.

    This ship was carrying a black box detector, which is lowered into the ocean in an effort to get closer to a possible “ping” in the area northwest of Perth, designated as the most likely area that the plane went into the ocean, the state news agency Xinhua reported.

    The signal had a frequency of 37.5kHz per second – the standard for black box flight recorders and one that is chosen because it stands out from other noise. A black box is designed to emit one pulse every second for approximately 30 days.

    A reporter with Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, who was onboard the ship Haixun, China’s largest search vessel, said the patrol ship first picked up the signal on Friday when it was detected intermittently for about 15 minutes. Sources are skeptical, however, as other vessels were in the vicinity at the time and could have been the source of the pings.

    But Haixun picked up the signal again on Saturday, detecting pings every second for a full 90 seconds.

    There has been concern that the black box was nearing its battery life, which sent dozens of ships, planes and submarines to the search on Saturday, the 28th day since it disappeared.

    Also included in this massive search were 10 military planes, three civilian jets and 11 ships sent to the southern Indian Ocean for the Boeing 777, which disappeared on March 8 with 239 passengers and crew onboard.

    Military and civilian planes, ships with deep-sea searching equipment and a British nuclear submarine are scouring a remote patch of the southern Indian Ocean off Australia’s west coast, in the increasingly urgent hunt for debris and the “black box” recorders that hold vital information about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370’s last hours.

    Australian Defense Minister David Johnston urged caution, saying he had not received a report on the signal and warned that it may not be from the plane.

    “This is not the first time we have had something that has turned out to be very disappointing,” he told ABC television.

    “I’m just going to wait for (JACC chief) Angus (Houston) and the team and my team to come forward with something that’s positive because this is a very very difficult task.”

    Relatives of the 153 Chinese passengers of Flight MH370 were still digesting the news on Saturday.

    Mr. Chen, 63, said he had become “lost and disappointed” with the so far “fruitless” search. Saturday night’s reports at least felt like progress had been made.

    “We still want to know what happened. I hope the search and rescue ships, especially those from China, can carry on with their work, finding the debris of the plane as well as the passengers’ belongings [so we have] something to remind us of ours loved-ones.”

    Image via YouTube