An Australian ship picked up again signals heard at the weekend that could come from downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, officials said on Wednesday.
The Ocean Shield re-acquired the signal late Tuesday for five minutes and 32 seconds and again for about seven minutes, search leader Angus Houston said.
Recapturing a pulse first detected on Saturday has raised hopes of finding the Boeing 777 that went missing a month ago one hour into a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.
“I believe we’re searching in the right area,” said Houston, appointed last month to head the Joint Agency Coordination Centre leading the search for the plane.
The Ocean Shield is towing a pinger locator along 7—kilometre sweeps of a location where computer analysis suggests the plane may have gone down after running out of fuel.
The pings the ship picked up were at 1 second intervals, consistent with those transmitted from flight data recorders. They were near the final radar “handshake” MH370 made with satellites.
“We’ve had the analysis done. It’s nothing natural. It comes from a man-made device and it’s consistent with a locator on a black box,” Houston said.
The former Australian armed forces chief said it was too soon to lower the underwater drone waiting aboard the Ocean Shield.
“Clearly, we’re not at that point yet,” the former pilot said. “I would imagine it’s not far away before we deploy something to go down and have a look.” Houston said there were still no visual sightings of wreckage.
“None of the debris we’ve found thus far has had a connection to MH370,” he said.
Up to 15 aircraft and 14 ships are scouring some of the world’s deepest waters around 2,250 kilometres off Australia’s west coast.
Time is against the multinational force because the batteries that power the black-box beacons are now beyond their regulation shelf-life.
“We are looking for transmissions that are probably weaker than they would be earlier on,” Houston told reporters in Perth, the headquarters of the search.