Hi-tech search for MH370’s black box

As ‘black box’ was found beneath Indian Ocean Malaysian minister said,”Miracles do happen”. Australian official called the news ‘a most promising lead’. It could take days to verify signals picked up by Australia’s Ocean Shield. British Navy’s HMS Echo arrived in region 1,000 miles west of Australia. Two pings were detected within a small patch of 84,000-square-mile search zone.
Batteries powering plane’s black box are expected to run out imminently. Nine military planes, three civilian planes and 14 ships are in search.
A senior Malaysian official claimed ‘miracles do happen’ as it was revealed on Tuesday that underwater sounds detected by a ship searching the southern Indian Ocean for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet are consistent with the pings from aircraft black boxes.

Hoping against hope
Malaysian Defence Minister Hishammudin Hussein told reporters that satellite information ‘did not indicate or show survivors’ but later added: ‘We continue to hope and pray for survivors. We are just hoping against hope.”
Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency co-ordinating the search, warned that it could take days to confirm whether the signals picked up by the Australian navy ship Ocean Shield are indeed from the black boxes that belonged to Flight MH370, but called the discovery very encouraging.
‘We should not be too optimistic’ said U.S Navy Captain on MH370.
Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, head of the Joint Agency Coordination Centre leading the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, confirms authorities have detected signals consistent with a black box during a media conference in Perth.
After a month-long search for answers filled with dead ends, Monday’s news brought fresh hope given that the two black boxes, which contain flight data and cockpit voice recordings, are the key to unravelling exactly what happened to Flight MH370 and why.
‘We are cautiously hopeful that there will be a positive development in the next few days, if not hour,’ said.
‘Clearly this is a most promising lead, and probably in the search so far, it’s probably the best information that we have had,’ Mr Houston said at a news conference.
‘We’ve got a visual indication on a screen and we’ve also got an audible signal – and the audible signal sounds to me just like an emergency locator beacon.’
Asked if there was any chance of finding survivors from Flight MH370, he added: ‘We continue to hope and pray for survivors.’

A Chinese Ilyushin IL-76s aircraft at Perth international airport shortly before joining the search operation.

He said that all parties must be cautious about ‘unconfirmed findings and making conclusions’.
‘We have been through a real rollercoaster ride on some of the leads we have received. I am more optimistic about this one.’
There was little time left to locate the devices, which have beacons that emit ‘pings’ so they can be more easily found.
The beacons’ batteries last only about a month – and Tuesday marks exactly one month since the plane disappeared during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people on board.

High-tech sound detectors
The Australian navy’s Ocean Shield, which is carrying high-tech sound detectors from the US navy, picked up two separate signals late on Saturday night and early on Sunday morning within a remote patch of the Indian Ocean far off the west Australian coast that search crews have been criss-crossing for weeks.
The first signal lasted two hours and 20 minutes before it was lost. The ship then turned around and picked up a signal again – this time recording two distinct ‘pinger returns’ that lasted 13 minutes, Mr Houston said.
‘Significantly, this would be consistent with transmissions from both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder,’ Mr Houston said.

Australian Defence Vessel Ocean Shield picked up the third ‘ping’

Still, Mr Houston cautioned that it was too early to say the transmissions were coming from the missing jet.
‘I would want more confirmation before we say this is it,’ he said. ‘Without wreckage, we can’t say it’s definitely here. We’ve got to go down and have a look.’

Black box
The airliner’s black boxes normally emit a frequency of 37.5 kilohertz, and the signals picked up by the Ocean Shield were both 33.3 kilohertz, said US navy captain Mark Matthews. But officials contacted the device’s manufacturer and were told the frequency of black boxes can drift near the end of their shelf lives.
The Ocean Shield was slowly canvassing a small area trying to find the signal again, though that could take another day, Mr Matthews said.
‘It’s like playing hot and cold when you’re searching for something and someone’s telling you you’re getting warmer and warmer and warmer,’ he said. ‘When you’re right on top of it you get a good return.’
If they pick up the signal again, the crew will launch an underwater vehicle to investigate, Mr Matthews said.
The Bluefin-21 autonomous sub can create a sonar map of the area to chart where the debris may lie on the sea floor.
If it maps out a debris field, the crew will replace the sonar system with a camera unit to photograph any wreckage.
But that may prove tricky, given that the sub can only dive to about 4,500 metres (14,800 feet) – the approximate depth of the water.
That means the vehicle will be operating to the limits of its capability.

Very deep oceanic water

Black box

Given the difficulties involved, officials warned the mystery of Flight MH370 would still take time to resolve.
‘It could take some days before the information is available to establish whether these detections can be confirmed as being from MH370,’ Mr Houston said. ‘In very deep oceanic water, nothing happens fast.’
Geoff Dell, discipline leader of accident investigation at Central Queensland University in Australia, said it would be ‘coincidental in the extreme’ for the sounds to have come from anything other than an aircraft’s black box.
‘If they have got a reasonable signal, and it’s not from one of the other vessels or something, you would have to say they are within a bull’s roar,’ he said.
‘There’s still a chance that it’s a spurious signal that’s coming from somewhere else and they are chasing a ghost, but it certainly is encouraging that they’ve found something to suggest they are in the right spot.’
Meanwhile, the British ship HMS Echo was using sophisticated sound-locating equipment to try to determine whether two separate sounds heard by a Chinese ship about 555 kilometres (345 miles) away from the Ocean Shield were related to the plane.
The patrol vessel Haixun 01 detected a brief ‘pulse signal’ on Friday and a second signal on Saturday.
Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, who is leading the search for missing MH370, said today three separate sounds detected from deep in the Indian Ocean were an ‘important and encouraging lead’
The crew of the Chinese ship reportedly picked up the signals using a sonar device called a hydrophone dangled over the side of a small boat – something experts said was technically possible but extremely unlikely.
The equipment aboard the British and Australian ships is dragged slowly behind each vessel over long distances and is considered far more sophisticated.
The search effort was also continuing on the ocean surface on Monday. Twelve planes and 14 ships were searching three designated zones, one of which overlaps with the Ocean Shield’s underwater search.
All of the previous surface searches have found only fishing equipment or other sea rubbish floating in the water, but have found no debris related to the Malaysian plane.

This image shows a map indicating the locations of search vessels looking for signs of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean. An Australian official overseeing the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane said underwater sounds picked up by equipment on an Australian navy ship are consistent with transmissions from black box recorders on a plane.

A new report suggesting that the missing flight MH370 deliberately circled around Indonesian air space after it vanished appears to lend credibility to an earlier claim that the jet was hijacked.
CNN reported that it had been told that the Boeing 777 might have flown around Indonesian air space on the night it vanished in what could have been a deliberate attempt to avoid radar detection.
An image showing a piece of white debris which was spotted by Chinese air force in the southern Indian Ocean yesterday close to where they heard the ‘pings’ believed to be from the black box    +21
An image showing a piece of white debris which was spotted by Chinese air force in the southern Indian Ocean yesterday close to where they heard the ‘pings’ believed to be from the black box
Although the email cannot be verified and the claimed government source has not been identified, its contents tend to fit in with separate information now received by CNN.
The writer, who corresponded in Chinese, said in the translation that if an agreement was reached for the jail sentence to be lifted, the aircraft would be allowed to land safely.
But if, after five hours no agreement was reached, ‘the plane will be destroyed’.
The source said in the email that although the aircraft’s main communication system had been closed down, negotiations continued through what the writer said was an ‘internal communication channel.’
According to the source, the government took five hours to declare the loss of the plane because that was when the negotiation time ran out and when officials realised the aircraft could not stay in the air any longer. During those five hours, said the writer, ‘the plane was always flying around the Malaysian area.’

White objects
He said that China also reported seeing white objects floating in the sea 55 miles from where the ping was detected.
The movements of every passenger and crew member in the hours before the ill-fated MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur have been examined by detectives sifting through CCTV cameras mounted at the airport and on the nearby motorway.
They have examined the faces of passengers and crew passing through an automatic toll point near the airport and have watched security footage of all passengers as they strolled around the airport prior to taking off on the scheduled flight to Beijing.
Rearchers for missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 are looking for an orange— not black box— in an effort to unlock the mystery of the jet’s disappearance, The New York Times reported.
The idea of recording cockpit conversations is credited to David Warren, an Australian chemist, who in 1953 was involved in investigating the crash of a jet aircraft. “I kept thinking to myself . . . If only we could recapture those last few seconds it would save all this argument and uncertainty.”
The first audio flight recorder used a cylinder of magnetized steel wire. Warren traced the moniker “black box” to WWII-era British Air Force slang.
The first pre-audio recorder dates back to 1939 and was designed by François Hussenot, a French engineer. He hid the technology from the invading German army by burying it near an Atlantic Ocean beach in June 1940. Hussenot’s camera-like device used mirrors to record to film an aircraft’s altitude, air speed, and the position of the pilot’s controls. The data was stored in a black box.

Source: Weekly Holiday