MH370: Searchers confident they are in the 'right area'

This further narrowed the search area for the missing Malaysia Airline (MAS) flight.

Head of the Australian Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC), Angus Houston, told reporters today that the latest pings heard by a “towed pinger locator” on the Australian ship Ocean Shield was consistent with that of an airplane blackbox.

The transmissions – heard on Tuesday afternoon and night – lasted five minutes 32 seconds, and approximately seven minutes, respectively.

“I have confidence that we are in the right area. I am not going to give a final confirmation, until somebody has seen the wreckage… the last resting place of MH370,” Houston told the media in a press conference in Perth, advising caution for the sake of the families.

Day 33 of the search for the Malaysia Airlines (MAS) plane will continue with 11 military aircraft, four civil aircraft and 14 ships now covering a smaller area of about 75,000 square kilometres in the southern Indian Ocean.

On Saturday, two transmissions first were detected by Ocean Shield. Houston today said experts who analysed those initial data have concluded that it was “very stead and distinct” and was consistent with a “electronic device” possibly a flight data recorder. ‘Underwater search soon’

Houston, who said that the search area “has significantly reduced” and is “concentrated on a much smaller area” reiterated that the more time spent on focusing the search area, the better time the subsequent underwater search will be.

“As soon as we are finished with the towed pinger locator, exhausted all surface possibilities, and there is probably no more hope of finding more transmissions (from the pinger), then we will deploy the autonomous underwater vehicle,” he said of the named Bluefin-21, on board Ocean Shield which would be sent out to the sea floor.

The US-made Bluefin-21 unmanned underwater vehicle, designed for deep sea surveying and carry video cameras, searches at a pace around six times slower than the pinger locator.

Houston said that he believe that the batteries on the blackboxes might be fading soon as the last signal was quite weak.

“Batteries of both devices will very shortly fail. We are very fortunate to get transmissions on Day 33,” he said of the 30 day official lifespan of a transmitter on a blackbox, which can last for an estimated two more weeks at before all transmission stops.

He was unable to confirm if the signals were from one or two devices. The MAS Boeing 777-200ER aircraft carries two blackboxes, one a flight data recorder and the other voice data recorder.

“We need to make hay while the sun shines. We need all the data we can. With more data, we can compress into a smaller area in this very difficult and challenging search,” he said.

Asked repeatedly how long it might take for the underwater search to begin, Houston could only say that the time was ‘not far away’, noting that in the Air France case, it took 20 days after the area was reduced to a very small area before the blackbox was found.

“Searching underwater is an extremely laborious task. The more work we can do with the towed pinger locator, the less work we need to do at the scouring sea floor,” he said.

Houston also said that when the remote autonomous underwater vehicle was deployed to scour the sea floor, it would be a challenge as analysts said the ocean floor was filled with silt that could obscure vision.

On the debris that have been spotted so far, Houston said that none of them have been linked to MH370, and he admitted that authorities have “no idea” what was really under the water at this point.

He said about a dozen aircraft are still visually searching the area some 2,261 km northwest of Perth hoping to find “something in the surface to confirm the aircraft entered the water in that location.”

On the previous accoustic sounds heard by China’s Haixun 01 a few days before, Houston said Britain’s HMS Echo are working the southern end, while the signals detected by Ocean Shield is on the northern end.

“We are not putting all our eggs in one basket we are continuing to look where Haixun detected those sounds. (But) we are doing a much more intense search here (where Ocean Shield is)”

Flight MH370, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew, left Kuala Lumpur at 12.41 am on March 8 and disappeared from radar screens less than an hour later. It was to have arrived in Beijing at 6.30 am the same day.

A multinational search was mounted for the aircraft, first in the South China Sea but after it was learnt that the plane had been ‘deliberately’ flown off course, the search was focused along two corridors - the northern corridor stretching from the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to northern Thailand, and the southern corridor, from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean.

However, following an unprecedented type of analysis of satellite data, United Kingdom satellite telecommunications company Inmarsat and the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) concluded that Flight MH370 flew along the southern corridor and that its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth.

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak announced on March 24, seventeen days after the disappearance of the aircraft, that Flight MH370 "ended in the southern Indian Ocean".