Search planes, ships divert to Indian Ocean area where 'pings detected

(Agencies/Xinhua) Updated: 2014-04-07 10:03

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Search planes, ships divert to Indian Ocean area where 'pings detected

Boats sent by Chinese naval ship Jinggangshan head for suspected areas to search for the missing flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean, on April 6, 2014. The month-long hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 continued Sunday after a Chinese ship reported the detection of electronic pulse signals possibly related to missing jet in the southern Indian Ocean. [Photo/Xinhua]

SYDNEY/PERTH, Australia - Up to nine military planes, three civilian planes and 14 ships will assist in Monday's search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, the Joint Agency Coordination Center (JACC) for the international search efforts said.

The search area is expected to be approximately 234,000 square kilometers, and weather is expected to be fine throughout the day with showers in the afternoon although this is not expected to affect the search.

According to the JACC, Australian Defense Vessel Ocean Shield is continuing investigations in its own area, and British HMS Echo is en route to assist the Chinese vessel Haixun 01, which detected pulse signals in the Indian Ocean.

A Chinese IL-76 transport aircraft took off at about 6:00 local time (22:00 on Sunday GMT) from the Perth International Airport to conduct searching in an area about 2,000 kilometers to Perth, according to a press liaison official with China's embassy to Australia.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau continues to refine the area where the aircraft entered the water based on continuing ground-breaking and multi-disciplinary technical analysis of satellite communication and aircraft performance, passed from the international air crash investigative team comprising analysts from Malaysia, the United States, the United Kingdom, China and Australia.

Possible pings signals

The black boxes, thought be to lying on the ocean floor, are equipped with locator beacons that send pings on the same frequency as those detected by the Chinese naval ship, but the beacons' batteries are thought to be running out by now, a month after Flight MH370 disappeared.

"We are running out of time in terms of terms of the battery life," Retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, head of the Australian agency coordinating the operation, told a news conference in Perth on Sunday.

The black boxes record cockpit data and may provide answers about what happened to the plane, which was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew when it vanished off radar on March 8 and flew thousands of km off its Kuala Lumpur-to-Beijing route.

Chinese patrol ship Haixun 01 reported receiving a pulse signal with a frequency of 37.5 kHz, consistent with the signal emitted by flight recorders, on Friday and again on Saturday.

"The 37.5kHz is the specific frequency that these locator pingers operate on," said Anish Patel, president of Sarasota, Florida-based Dukane Seacom, which made the black box locator.

"It's a very unique frequency, typically not found in background ocean noise," such as whales or other marine mammals, he told Reuters.

The pulses were detected within two km (1.2 miles) of each other but were hundreds of nautical miles outside the main search zone in the southern Indian Ocean which has been scoured by planes and aircraft for more than a week.