By Robb M. Stewart and Ross Kelly
MELBOURNE, Australia--The hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
continued Monday with a U.K. military vessel en route to check out
signals detected by a Chinese ship over the weekend, as locator
beacons attached to the plane's "black box" flight recorders near
the likely end of their battery life.
Locator beacons on two flight recorders aboard the plane have an
estimated battery life of about 30 days before they stop emitting
signals. Monday marks the 30th day since the Boeing 777 200
jetliner vanished from civilian radar on a flight from Kuala Lumpur
to Beijing on March 8 with 239 people on board. The devices, if
found, could provide vital clues to what occurred on the ill-fated
flight.
Nine military and three civilian aircraft were set to join 14
ships scouring a stretch of roughly 234,000 square kilometers
(90,000 square miles) in the southern Indian Ocean for the black
boxes and debris from the jetliner, Australia's Joint Agency
Coordination Centre, which is coordinating the multinational
search, said Monday.
Good weather was expected throughout the day, with rain showers
forecast for the afternoon unlikely to affect the search, the
agency said.
The U.K. Royal Navy ship HMS Echo is on its way to assist the
Chinese vessel Haixun 01, which reported detecting several
"acoustic pings" on Friday and Saturday about 2 kilometers (1.2
miles) apart. The signals were thought to be consistent with
frequencies belonging to the missing aircraft's flight
recorders.
An Australian naval ship, Ocean Shield, picked up separate pulse
signals on Sunday about 300 nautical miles away and was continuing
to search that area, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre said
Monday. The Australian vessel has been fitted with U.S. Navy
black-box detector equipment that is able to detect signals from
the flight recorders at deeper levels than the Chinese device. The
Chinese listening device was designed to identify sounds at depths
of less than 1,000 feet, according to one person briefed on the
Flight 370 probe, while the ocean bottom in parts of the search
area exceeds 13,000 feet.
It is still far from certain the pings are from the missing
plane. Air-safety experts say other maritime locating devices also
use similar frequencies. Following a signal that search teams
detected on April 3 but later discounted, the Australian agency
warned that biological sources, such as whales, and shipping could
lead to false alerts. Further complicating the search, the pulse
signals received were patchy.
Nevertheless, retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, who is in
charge of the Australian search agency, has said the Chinese
findings were an important and encouraging lead.
The search area where Flight 370 is thought to have hit the
ocean continues to be refined based on technical analysis by air
crash investigators from Malaysia, the U.S., the U.K., China and
Australia. Authorities are now focusing on the southern part of the
designated search zone, which has been divided into three dispersed
blocks, based on the latest analysis that suggests the missing
flight traveled slightly farther south than previously thought.
"The area of highest probability we think is now probably in the
southern part of the area pretty close to where Haixun 01 is
operating," Air Chief Marshal Houston said Sunday. When it detected
the pings, Haixun 01 had been searching in an area of the southern
Indian Ocean close to but still outside three designated search
zones. Air Marshal Houston dismissed the idea that China was acting
unilaterally.
"China's sharing everything that's relevant to this search," he
said, adding that the agency was "very satisfied" with the
"consultation and coordination" it was receiving from China, which
lost 153 citizens aboard the missing plane.
The focus of the search for Flight 370 swung abruptly to the
southern Indian Ocean on March 20, based on satellite images of
possible plane debris. It later shifted around 700 miles to the
north of the first search zone in the ocean after further
calculations were made to radar data.
Now in its fifth week, the hunt for Flight 370 so far has
yielded only unrelated scraps of junk. Last week, the search was
joined by a U.K. military submarine equipped to detect signals from
the flight-data and cockpit voice recorders. The nuclear-powered
HMS Tireless, built for the Royal Navy as a Cold War attack
vehicle, has equipment on board that may also help pinpoint signals
from Flight 370's recorders. It could also be used to search for
aircraft wreckage along the largely undisturbed seabed.
Andy Pasztor contributed to this article.
Write to Robb M. Stewart at robb.stewart@wsj.com and Ross Kelly
at ross.kelly@wsj.com
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