More pings heard in search for flight MH2370

A ship searching for the missing Malaysian Airlines jet has detected two more underwater signals, raising hopes the wreckage of the plane will be spotted soon, the man in charge of the search said.

Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency co-ordinating the search for the missing Boeing 777 in the southern Indian Ocean, said the Australian navy’s Ocean Shield picked up the two signals in a sweep yesterday.

(Search chief Angus Houston briefing the press. Picture: AP Photo/Rob Griffith)

“I think we are looking in the right area but I am not prepared to confirm anything until such time someone lays eyes on the wreckage,” he said.

The Ocean Shield first detected the sounds late on Saturday and early Sunday before losing them.

The ship is equipped with a US Navy towed pinger locator designed to pick up signals from a plane’s black boxes – the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.

“Hopefully in a matter of days, we will be able to find something on the bottom that might confirm that this is the last resting place of MH370,” retired air chief marshal Mr Houston said in Perth, the starting point for the southern Indian Ocean search.

“I’m now optimistic that we will find the aircraft, or what is left of the aircraft, in the not too distant future – but we haven’t found it yet, because this is a very challenging business. And I would just like to have that hard evidence...photograph evidence...that this is the final resting place of MH370.”

Finding the sound again is crucial to narrowing the search area so a small submarine can be deployed to chart a potential debris field on the sea bed. If the autonomous sub was used now with the sparse data collected so far, covering all the potential places from which the pings might have come would take many days.

“The better Ocean Shield can define the area, the easier it will be for the autonomous underwater vehicle to subsequently search for aircraft wreckage,” Mr Houston said.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, carrying 239 people on board, went missing on March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, setting off one of aviation’s biggest mysteries.

The search has shifted from waters off of Vietnam, to the Strait of Malacca and then finally to waters in the southern Indian Ocean as data from radar and satellites was further analysed.

The locator beacons on the black boxes have a battery life of only about a month – and yesterday marked exactly one month since the plane vanished.

Finding any wreckage in such deep water has proved to be a monumental task.

In addition to the depth and remoteness of the area, search crews are also contending with layers of silt on the sea bed that can both hide any possible wreckage and distort the sounds emanating from the black boxes that may be resting there, said Royal Australian Navy commodore Peter Leavy.

Meanwhile, the search for debris on the ocean surface picked up intensity, with 15 planes and 14 ships scouring a 29,121 square mile area that extends from 1,405 miles north west of Perth.