By Siva Govindasamy and Swati Pandey
KUALA LUMPUR/PERTH, Australia (Reuters) - A Chinese patrol ship hunting for a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner detected a pulse signal in the south Indian Ocean on Saturday, the state news agency Xinhua reported, in a possible indicator of the underwater beacon from a plane's "black box".
Australian authorities said the so-called Towed Pinger Locator would be pulled behind navy ship HMAS Ocean Shield, searching a converging course on a 240-km (150-mile) track with British hydrographic survey ship HMS Echo.
KUALA LUMPUR/PERTH, Australia (Reuters) - A Chinese patrol ship hunting for a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner detected a pulse signal in the south Indian Ocean on Saturday, the state news agency Xinhua reported, in a possible indicator of the underwater beacon from a plane's "black box".
Australian search authorities said such a signal would be "consistent"
with a black box, but both they and Xinhua stressed there was no
conclusive evidence linking the "ping" to Flight MH370, which went
missing on March 8 with 239 people aboard shortly after taking off from
Kuala Lumpur for Beijing.
A
black box detector deployed by the vessel Haixun 01 picked up the "ping"
signal with a frequency of 37.5kHz per second - the same as emitted by
flight recorders - at about 25 degrees south latitude and 101 degrees
east longitude, Xinhua said.
Xinhua also reported that a Chinese air force plane had spotted a number of white floating objects in the search area.
Dozens of ships and planes from 26 countries are racing to find the black box recorders before their batteries run out.
Up to 10 military planes, three civilian jets and 11 ships are scouring
a 217,000-sq-km (88,000-sq-mile) patch of desolate ocean some 1,700 km
(1,060 miles) northwest of Perth, Australia, near where investigators
believe the Boeing went down.
"The characteristics
reported (by the Chinese vessel) are consistent with the aircraft black
box," Retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, head of the Australian
agency coordinating the operation, said in a statement.
"However, there is no confirmation at this stage that the signals and
the objects are related to the missing aircraft," he said, adding his
agency was seeking more information from China.
SONAR EQUIPMENT
Authorities have not ruled out mechanical problems as a cause of the
plane's disappearance, but say the evidence, including loss of
communications, suggests it was deliberately diverted thousands of
kilometers (miles) from its set route.
Sonar equipment on two
ships joining the search may help find the black box voice and data
recorders that are key to unlocking what happened on the flight.Australian authorities said the so-called Towed Pinger Locator would be pulled behind navy ship HMAS Ocean Shield, searching a converging course on a 240-km (150-mile) track with British hydrographic survey ship HMS Echo.
Experts say the Towed
Pinger Locator may be of little use unless investigators can get a much
better idea of exactly where the plane went into the water because its
limited range and the slow speed at which it must be pulled behind the
ship mean it cannot cover large areas of ocean quickly.
"I won't even call it an area. What we are doing is we are tracking
down the best estimate of the course that the aircraft was on," U.S.
Navy Captain Mark Matthews told Reuters. "It takes a couple of days on
each leg so it's a slow-going search."
Britain is also sending
HMS Tireless, a nuclear submarine with sonar capabilities, and a
Malaysian frigate was due to arrive in the search area on Saturday.
"If we haven't found anything in six weeks we will continue because
there are a lot of things in the aircraft that will float," Australia's
Houston told reporters.
Dozens of flights by a multinational taskforce have failed to turn up any trace of the plane in the past four weeks.
The Boeing 777 was briefly picked up on military radar on the other
side of Malaysia and analysis of subsequent hourly electronic
"handshakes" exchanged with a satellite led investigators to conclude
the plane had crashed far off the west Australian coast hours later.
INVESTIGATION
Malaysian authorities have faced heavy criticism, particularly from
China, for mismanaging the search and holding back information. Most of
the 227 passengers were Chinese.
Malaysia said on Saturday it had launched a formal investigation into
the plane's disappearance that would include experts from Australia, the
United States, China, Britain and France.
Normally, a formal air safety investigation is not launched until
wreckage is found. But there have been concerns that Malaysia's informal
investigations to date have lacked the legal standing of an official
inquiry convened under U.N. rules.
Under International Civil Aviation Organization rules, the country
where the aircraft is registered leads the investigation when the
incident takes place in international waters.
Malaysia's Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said the investigation
would comprise three groups: one would examine maintenance records,
structures and systems; an "operations" group would study flight
recorders, operations and meteorology; and a "medical and human factors"
group would look into psychology, pathology and survival.
(Additional reporting by Tim Hepher in Paris, Niluksi Koswanage in
KUALA LUMPUR, Jane Wardell in SYDNEY; Writing by Siva Govindasamy and
Mark Bendeich; Editing by Nick Macfie and Gareth Jones)
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