China’s Haixun 01 ship has detected pulse signal in the South Indian Ocean, Xinhua news agency reports.
The signal, at 37.5 kHz per second, was picked up by a black box locator at 25 degrees south latitude and 101 degrees east longitude.
It is yet to be determined whether the signal is related to the missing flight MH370 of the Malaysian Airlines, the report says.
The signal was picked up at 4:30pm, which lasted about one minute and a half, the jfdaily.com reports.
Haixun 01 has previously intensified the search for the black box as it only has a designed capacity of emitting an underwater locator beacon for up to 30 days.
Crew members of Haixun 01 onboard life boats scanned relevant waters with a detector aboard which can monitor an acoustic wave released by a black box under 3,000-5000 meters of water.
“The end of the valid period that the black box can emit an locator beacon is approaching now. The deadline will fall on April 6. So we are taking advantage of this technology as far as possible for the search work,” said Zhang Liang, head of the survey team of the Shanghai Maritime Mapping Center.
The pulse signal with a frequency of 37.5 kHz is the standard beacon frequency for both so-called black boxes — the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, CNN quotes Anish Patel, president of pinger manufacturer Dukane Seacom, as saying. “They’re identical.”
A massive hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 resumed Saturday, the 28th day since it disappeared, with newly-mobilized underwater search effort.
Up to 10 military planes, three civil jets and 11 ships joined the search for MH370, including Australian navy vessel Ocean Shield and British oceanographic vessel HMS Echo tasked with underwater operations.
An area of about 217,000 square kilometers, 1,700 kilometers northwest of Perth will be scanned with the aid of fair weather conditions, according to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA).
Ocean Shield equipped with a U.S. towed pinger locator and HMS Echo will continue scouring a single 240 kilometer underwater track converging on each other.
The sub-surface search was launched on Friday in an attempt to recover the black box of MH370.
The hi-tech towed pinger locator is capable of picking up emissions from the black box pinger up to 6,100 meter under sea surface while the Echo is fitted with an array of sensors and sidescan sonar for surveying the ocean floor.
The black box contains a pinger with a battery life of about 30 days after a crash.
The MH370 with 239 people on board is believed to have crashed on March 8 in the southern Indian Ocean west of Perth, although no confirmed debris has been found from the plane.
The underwater scan zone has been carefully chosen based on ” analysis by the investigative team from five nations of the most likely aircraft track to where the aircraft might enter into the water,”said Angus Houston, chief of the Joint Agency Coordination Center (JACC) leading the search from Perth in Western Australia.
