THE authority charged with conducting a multi-million-dollar search for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet has moved to hose down suggestions that a key assumption about signals from the aircraft’s flight data recorders may be incorrect.
Doubts about the origin of the signals detected during a sweep of the Indian Ocean for the aircraft’s “black boxes’’ emerged in The Wall Street Journal yesterday when the captain of Ocean Shield, the Australian vessel that has been scouring the ocean for the lost plane, indicated some of the signals might not have come from the flight recorders.
The paper reported that Commander James Lybrand told it authorities were increasingly considering only the two transmissions on April 5 as relevant to the search and that further analysis of signals sent on April 8 had led to doubts they were from a man-made device. This was because the 27kHz transmissions on April 8 were much lower than the 37.5kHz frequency that beacons were designed to emit.
“As far as frequency goes, between 33kHz and 27 kHz is a pretty large jump,” Commander Lybrand said.
The April 5 transmissions were also lower at 33kHz, but officials told the paper this anomaly could have been caused by weakening batteries and the deep sea conditions.
However, the Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre said analysis of all four detections was continuing.
“It is too early to discount any of the acoustic detections,’’ it said.
“As Air Chief Marshal (Angus) Houston has said, the four signals taken together constitute the most promising lead we have in the search for MH370. We continue to pursue this lead to either discount or confirm the area of the detections as the final resting place of MH370.’’
The search has failed to turn up any trace of MH370 and experts in Canberra have been poring over what little data is available to refine the search area.
The Ocean Shield, which is carrying the US Navy Bluefin-21 minisub, is resuming the hunt in the hope that it can narrow the search area, which was defined through a world-first analysis of satellite signals.
How a modern jetliner disappeared without trace has become the biggest aviation mystery of the 21st century and prompted International Civil Aviation Organisation to rethink the way civilian aircraft are monitored.
It has sought solutions from industry, and initial indications are that could be done with existing off-the-shelf solutions for $US100,000.
British satellite company Inmarsat, which was responsible for the calculations that identified the Indian Ocean as a likely crash site, has since offered a free basic tracking service to global airlines through its satellite network.
The company also offered an enhanced position-reporting facility to support reduced in-flight aircraft separation and a “black box in the cloud” service.
This would see historic and real-time flight data and cockpit voice recorder information streamed off an aircraft during an unusual event.
Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au
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