MH370 Search Chief 'Optimistic' Of Finding Jet

What Search Team Will Be Doing Now

Updated: 1:58pm UK, Wednesday 09 April 2014

The team looking for the black boxes of Flight MH370 know they have just hours left before the 'pings' they are listening for cease.

The Australian ADV Ocean Shield is plying the waters within an ever-decreasing search area about 1,050 miles (1,700km) from Perth, Australia.

All of the pings detected so far have been picked up close to one of the paths the plane was 'calculated' to have travelled along, based on data from the British Inmarsat satellite.

The task now will be to attempt to use those signals to hone in on a position for the flight data recorder and voice cockpit recorder, thought to be lying somewhere on the southern Indian ocean floor.

It will be no mean feat.

A ping is a moment of sound that lasts just 0.0093 seconds - a tenth of the blink of a human eye - and is repeated every second.

The signal detected is being emitted at 33.331KHz - different to the 37.5KHz pingers are supposed to emit at but, according to the search team, consistent with what would be expected.

The seabed is 4,500m (14,600ft) below where Ocean Shield is searching. There is also a lot of underwater 'background noise', which makes hearing the signal problematic.

The ship is making straight line passes across the area where the 'pings' have been detected in the hope of hearing more.

On Sunday, the pinger locator - a yellow fin-like device, full of sensitive electronics - was towed behind Ocean Shield at a depth of 300m.

When it picked up the first signal, it was lowered to a depth of 1,400m, and continued to hear the ping for two hours.

The ship was only travelling at about 2mph at the time. The pings are only supposed to be able to be heard up to about two miles away from the black box emitting it. 

In order to confirm if they had definitely picked up a genuine signal, the ship turned around - an operation that takes around three hours - and went on a parallel path about a mile away from the original track.

Along that pass, the pings were heard for about 15 minutes. 

The searchers have continued running parallel paths, up to a mile apart. The latest set of pings detected on Tuesday were only heard for five minutes and 30 seconds and then for seven minutes.

The task for the searchers is to narrow down the search area, knowing that the range of the pings is normally no more than 2,000-3,000 metres. 

But they do not have long. The pinger is already emitting a signal beyond the 30-days it is supposed to be able to last.

The manufacturers say the team may have one or two more days left, if they are lucky.

Anish Patel, head of Florida-based pinger maker Dukane Seacom, said: "Now that 30 days have passed we are in bonus time.

"The units are certified to last 30 days but there is a small design margin ... (of) a few extra days of power."

Even when the source of ping has been located, another search will begin. An American underwater robot called Bluefin-21 is being readied to take over.

Bluefin-21 found the wreckage of an F-15 fighter jet which crashed off Japan last year.

But finding MH370's black boxes will be hampered by an underwater landscape that is mountainous and completely without natural light.

US Navy Captain Mark Matthews said signals so far suggest the device emitting the pings is somewhere within about a 20km (12 mile) radius.

That equates, he said, to a 1,300 sq km (500 square mile) chunk of the ocean floor, which would take the sub about six weeks to two months to fully explore.

Royal Australian Navy commodore Peter Leavy, who is helping to lead the search, said search crews are also contending with a thick layer of silt on the sea floor that can both hide wreckage and distort sounds from the black boxes.

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