Malaysia Air Airliner missing

[VITE1]

Yet more lies from the Malysian government.

MH370 search could 'drag on for long time' | National News - WMUR Home

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (CNN) —They were words heard around the world as investigators searched for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.

Weeks ago, Malaysian authorities said the last message from the airplane cockpit was, "All right, good night."

The sign-off to air traffic controllers, which investigators said was spoken by the plane's copilot, was among the few concrete details officials released in a mystery that's baffled investigators since the Boeing 777 disappeared with 239 people aboard on March 8.

There's only one problem. It turns out, it wasn't true.

On Tuesday, Malaysia's Transport Ministry released the transcript of the conversations between the Flight 370's cockpit and air traffic control. The final words from the plane: "Good night Malaysian three seven zero."


Malaysian authorities gave no explanation for the discrepancy between the two quotes. And authorities are still trying to determine whether it was the plane's pilot or copilot who said them.

The final quote is routine and is not a sign that anything untoward occurred aboard the flight, said CNN aviation analyst Mary Schiavo.

But the change in wording weeks into the search for the missing plane raises questions about how Malaysian officials have handled the investigation.

"It speaks to credibility issues, unfortunately," Schiavo said.

"We haven't had a straight, clear word that we can have a lot of fidelity in," said Michael Goldfarb, former chief of staff at the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. "We have the tragedy of the crash, we have the tragedy of an investigation gone awry and then we have questions about where we go from here."

Malaysian authorities have defended their handling of the situation.

Acting Transportation Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said Monday that authorities were not hiding anything by declining to release some details of the missing flight. Some details are part of ongoing investigations into what happened to the plane, he said.

"We are not hiding anything," he said. "We are just following the procedure that is being set."

Hussein said the transcript released Tuesday offered "no indication of anything abnormal."

Long search ahead

The search for what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 "could drag on for a very long time," the chief coordinator for the agency organizing the efforts said Tuesday.

"It's not something that's necessarily going to be resolved in the next two weeks, for example," said retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, chief coordinator of the Joint Agency Coordination Centre. The center was established on Monday and was in "setting up mode" on Tuesday.

The search area for the plane is extremely broad, "the like of which we probably haven't seen before," Houston told reporters Tuesday. But "our expectation is that it crashed into the southern (Indian) Ocean."

On Tuesday, 10 military planes, a civilian jet and nine ships are taking part in the Indian Ocean search, which spans a swath west of Perth that's 120,000 square kilometers (46,300 square miles), officials said.

The last known position for MH370 was around the Malacca Strait. But the plane apparently flew for several hours after that, and "that's the problem," Houston said.

"Essentially, we do not have any precision in where the aircraft entered the water."

Source: Plane's turn considered 'criminal act'

A Malaysian government source told CNN Monday that the airliner's turn off course is being considered a "criminal act," either by one of the pilots or someone else onboard the missing airliner.

And in a background briefing given to CNN, Malaysian investigators said they believed the plane was "flown by someone with good flying knowledge of the aircraft."

Several friends of Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah said they refuse to believe he could have been the "criminal" controlling the plane.

A senior Malaysian government official last week told CNN law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes that authorities have found nothing in days of investigating the two pilots that leads them to any motive, be it political, suicidal or extremist.

Several leads dry up

Potential leads on the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 keep coming. So do the setbacks and frustrations.

Weeks of searching have yielded nothing. "What we really need now is to find debris wreckage from the aircraft, and that will change the whole nature of our search because we will then be able to employ high technology to help assist us with the underwater search," Houston said.

Monday's search ended without finding anything significant, Australian officials said. Four orange objects spotted by search aircraft and earlier described as promising turned out be nothing more than old fishing gear, they said.

Chinese ships have checked and ruled out 11 locations in the southern Indian Ocean where suspicious objects had been spotted, China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported Tuesday.

U.S. Navy officials loaded underwater locating gear aboard an Australian naval ship and set out to sea Monday evening, but won't be able to use the equipment until investigators narrow the search zone.

The gear includes a pinger locator that's towed behind a ship and scans for the sound of the locator beacon attached to the plane's flight data recorder. Also onboard is an underwater drone that can scan the ocean floor for debris.

It will take the ship, the Ocean Shield, three days just to get to the search zone, leaving precious little time to locate the plane's flight data recorders before the batteries on its locator beacon run out. The batteries are designed to last 30 days; the plane has been missing for 24 days.

Under favorable sea conditions, the pingers can be heard 2 nautical miles away. But high seas, background noise, wreckage or silt can all make pingers harder to detect.

In this case, searchers barely know where to look at all.

Late last week, the search area shifted more than 600 miles after what authorities described as "a new credible lead." But a Wall Street Journal report Monday night, citing anonymous people familiar with the matter, said before that crews had searched for three days in the wrong location due to "lapses in coordination among countries and companies" trying to find the missing jet.

What happened? Andy Pasztor, one of the reporters who wrote the story, said it boiled down to poor coordination between two parts of the investigation: one dealing with satellite data, and the other one dealing with fuel consumption and aircraft performance.

"And so what we're left with is sort of a three-day gap where it's clear that folks were definitely looking in the wrong place," he said.

Relatives' demands

Family members of people onboard Flight 370 have accused Malaysian officials of giving them confusing, conflicting information since the plane vanished more than three weeks ago.

On Monday, dozens of Chinese family members visited a Kuala Lumpur temple. They chanted, lit candles and meditated.

"Chinese are kindhearted people," said Jiang Hui, the families' designated representative. "But we can clearly distinguish between the good and evil. We will never forgive for covering the truth from us and the criminal who delayed the rescue mission."

Hishammuddin said Malaysia will hold a high-level briefing for families where experts will explain some of the data and methodology used to guide the search.

He also said authorities have discussed with the families what happens if they are unable to find debris from the missing plane. But he declined to discuss it with reporters Monday, saying "to be fair to the families, that is something I would not want to share with the public at the moment."



Read more: MH370 search could 'drag on for long time' | National News - WMUR Home

[ApexOversteer]

Nice. The one thing we knew and they were lying?

Never gonna find it.

[99 pewtercoupe]

Driving home tonight I was listening to my favorite talk radio show. Every Tuesday they have a segment called Paranormal Tuesday where this weirdo called Dr Michael Lynch talks about UFOs, Bigfoot, ghosts, government conspiracies, etc


I missed the first part of his bit tonight but caught were he was claiming some group (funded by The Illuminati of course) had hijacked the plane. The plan is to crash it into The Bank of England and cause a global monetary crisis. I don't know how this guy keeps a straight face (but then it is radio not TV)

[VITE1]

Malaysia police admit missing jet mystery may never be solved | Fox News

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – A Malaysian police investigation into the pilots of the missing Malaysian jet might turn up nothing, the force's chief said Wednesday, while the head of the international search effort also acknowledged that an air hunt to spot wreckage on the surface of the southern Indian Ocean was not certain of success.

The statements underscored the lack of knowledge authorities have about what happened on Flight 370 and where it may have ended, and point to a scenario that becomes more likely with every passing day -- that the fate of the Boeing 777 its 239 passengers and crew might remain a mystery forever.

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The plane disappeared March 8 on a flight to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur after its transponders, which make the plane visible to commercial radar, were shut off. Military radar picked it up the jet just under an hour later, on the other side of the Malay peninsula. Authorities say until then its "movements were consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane" but have not ruled out anything, including mechanical error.

Police are investigating the pilots and crews for any evidence suggesting they may have hijacked or sabotaged the plane. The backgrounds of the passengers, two-thirds of whom were from China, have been checked by local and international investigators and nothing suspicious has been found.

"Investigations may go on and on and on. We have to clear every little thing," Inspector General Khalid Abu Bakar told reporters in Kuala Lumpur. "At the end of the investigations, we may not even know the real cause. We may not even know the reason for this incident."

Police are also investigating the cargo and the food served on the plane to eliminate possible poisoning of passengers and crew, he said.

The search for the plane began over the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea where the plane's last communications were, and then shifted west to the Strait of Malacca where it was last spotted by military radar. Experts then analyzed hourly satellite "handshakes" between the plane and a satellite and now believe it crashed somewhere into the southern Indian Ocean.

A search there began just over two weeks ago, and now involves at least nine ships and nine planes.

The current search area is a 221,000-square-kilometer (85,000-square-mile) patch of sea roughly a 2 1/2-hour flight from Perth. The focus of the search has moved several times as experts try to estimate where the plane is most likely to have landed based on assumptions on its altitude, speed and fuel. Currents in the sea are also being studied to see where any wreckage is most likely to have drifted.

Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency coordinating the multinational search effort out of Australia, said no time frame had been set for the search to end, but that a new approach would be needed if nothing showed up.

"Over time, if we don't find anything on the surface, we're going to have to think about what we do next, because clearly it's vitally important for the families, it's vitally important for the governments involved that we find this airplane," he told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

With no other data available indicating where the plane went down, spotting wreckage is key to narrowing down the search area and ultimately finding the plane's flight data recorders, which will provide a wealth of information about the condition the plane was flying under and possibly the communications or sounds in the cockpit.

The data recorders emit a "ping" that can be detected by special equipment towed by a ship in the immediate vicinity. But the recorders stop transmitting the "pings" about 30 days after a crash. Locating the data recorders and wreckage after that is possible, but it becomes an even more daunting task.

Houston said that only once wreckage from the plane was found "we will then be able to narrowly focus the search area so that we can start to exploit the underwater technology devices that will hopefully lead to where the aircraft is on the bottom of the ocean."

[Rob]

I have a feeling that they are never going to "find" that plane.

I also saw that the government is having "A closed-door briefing is being held in Kuala Lumpur for families of those on the flight."

Sounds to me like some people are being paid off now....

[Cybercowboy]

Ah, the Malaysian government is finally admitting that there may be a criminal investigation now. Hur dur, that really took some major sleuthing on their part.

[Mike Mercury]

Originally Posted by Cybercowboy

Ah, the Malaysian government is finally admitting that there may be a criminal investigation now. Hur dur, that really took some major sleuthing on their part.

delays... delays... delays. All to their benefit.

[VITE1]

Originally Posted by Mike Mercury

delays... delays... delays. All to their benefit.

The government is a major shareholder in the airline. Of course they want to see an investigation.

[Mike Mercury]

Finally; someone in Malaysia is speaking up:

Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim says "complicity by authorities on the ground" may be part of the mystery of the missing plane.

The Malaysian government has been deliberately concealing information about missing flight MH370, the country's main opposition leader has claimed.

In an interview with Sky News, Anwar Ibrahim cast doubt on official accounts coming from the authorities in his country and accused ministers of a "betrayal of trust" over their handling of the investigation.

Veteran politician Anwar said it was "not only unacceptable but not possible, not feasible" that the plane had not been sighted by their sophisticated radar system immediately after it changed course.

He claimed the radar would have instantly detected the jet as it travelled east to west across "at least four" Malaysian provinces.

He told Sky: "There is no reason as to why they are not able to detect the flight movement.

"If you can allow this to happen, then it is a betrayal of the people's trust. You cannot rely on an incompetent ministry to decide on our own security.

"They will have to explain. If they can't, they will have to tell us why this vital piece of information has been concealed from the general public and international community."

He added: "The system is opaque in the sense that they are used to a very compliant media, compliant judiciary, which will only question at the behest of the ruling establishment.

"When the information is available why not cooperate with international authorities and release it?"

Anwar, who personally knew MH370 pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah, has called for an international committee to take over the Malaysian-led operation, saying "the integrity of the whole nation is at stake".

He indicated it was even possible that there was "complicity by authorities on the ground" in what happened to the plane and the 239 people on board.

[VITE1]

Pinger is reported to be heard.




Chinese ship detects 'pulse signal' in search for missing Malaysia Airlines jet, report says | Fox News is reported to have been detected

[Cybercowboy]

And I bet it's another red herring.

[GS Ragtop]

Originally Posted by Cybercowboy

And I bet it's another red herring.

I hope not, but the events and 'sightings' of the last month suggest otherwise.

What *is* unusual is the candidness of the Chinese government the last few weeks. Typically, they make Sphinx look downright chatty, but they've issued early statements several times despite each being proved a false lead. Very unusual for them...

[Mike Mercury]

Sky News:

Xinhua news agency said the signal discovered by Chinese vessel Haixun 01 had a frequency of 37.5kHz - the same as that emitted by black-box devices.

A Chinese air force plane has also spotted a number of white floating objects in the search area, according to Xinhua.

The Joint Agency Coordination Centre in Australia, where the search is being overseen, confirmed a signal had been reported, but said its origin remained unknown.

Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston said: "The characteristics reported are consistent with the aircraft black box. A number of white objects were also sighted on the surface about 90 kilometres from the detection area.

"However, there is no confirmation at this stage that the signals and the objects are related to the missing aircraft."

Australian authorities are now considering sending air force crews to the area the signal was reported.

The signal was detected approximately 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) northwest of Perth 10 hours after news channels in China reported that the three Chinese vessels looking for MH370 had relocated to a new search area north of that designated by Australian authorities.

Even if the signal is from the black box, it could take weeks to recover it according to Australian defence minister David Johnston.

Sky News understands the Malaysians were informed of the development by the Chinese government a few hours before the news emerged.

Radar expert Professor David Stupples told Sky News: "If there has been a signal received, it could be the black box or it could be something extraneous.

"I don't know anything (else) that puts out the 37.5kHz signal."

Prof Stupples said he would remain "sceptical" until further evidence emerged.

He added: "My worry is the range. If this is in 2,000-3,000 metres of water, the range of the pinger is one to two kilometres at best.

"My recommendation would be to move the ships with the pinger locators very much closer to this, first of all to confirm this is the signal, and then two or three ships around it to do triangulation to fix the location."

Search teams are facing a race against time to find the black box, which a month after the plane went missing is likely to be running out of battery.

It comes after Malaysia's transport minister denied "extraordinary" claims the country was complicit in the disappearance of flight MH370.

In an interview with Sky News on Friday, Mayalsia's main opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim said the investigation had been "clearly suspect" and alleged "complicity by authorities on the ground".

But speaking at a news conference, acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein said: "Let me touch on some unfounded allegations made against Malaysia.

"These allegations include the extraordinary assertion that Malaysian authorities were somehow complicit in what happened to MH370.

"I would like to state for the record that these allegations are completely untrue.

"As I've said before, the search for MH370 should be above politics, and so I call on all Malaysians to unite, to stand by our armed forces as they work in difficult conditions thousands of miles from home, and to support all those who are working tirelessly in the search for MH370."

It was also revealed at the news conference that British nuclear submarine HMS Tireless had entered the search area.

The vessel was expected to play a crucial role in the quest to find the plane's black box, which could hold the key to solving the mystery of what happened.

"I spoke via telephone to the British Secretary of State for Defence, Philip Hammond, regarding the nuclear submarine HMS Tireless," said Mr Hussein.

"I hereby confirm the submarine is now in the search area and helping in the search operation."

Up to 10 military planes, three civilian jets and 11 ships have been scouring more than 1,000 square miles of sea off the west coast of Australia.

[VITE1]

Malaysia Airlines searchers say more pings consistent with black boxes heard | Fox News

Malaysia Airlines searchers say more pings consistent with black boxes heard
Published April 07, 2014 • FoxNews.comFacebook83 Twitter521 Gplus4 Malaysian officials said Monday that they were "cautiously hopeful" for decisive developments in the search for missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 hours after the Australian search coordinator said that a search ship had detected more signals consistent with those emitted from aircraft cockpit voice and flight data recorders -- so-called "black boxes" -- in an area of the Indian Ocean nearly three miles deep hundreds of miles off the western coast of Australia.

Malaysian defense minister Hishamuddin Hussein told reporters in Kuala Lumpur that he hoped the mystery of the plane's disappearance would be solved "in the next few days, if not hours."

Retired Australian Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston told reporters in Perth Monday that the latest detection of signals was "very encouraging" and "the best information we have.

"We've got a visual indication on a screen and we've also got an audible signal," Houston said, "and the audible signal sounds to me just like an emergency locator beacon."

However, he also stressed that the new findings did not constitute discovery of the plane, which disappeared early on the morning of March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing.

"We have not found the plane," said Houston, who added that it may take days to confirm whether signals picked up by the Australian ship Ocean Shield are indeed from the flight recorders. Houston said the position of the noise needs to be further refined and an underwater autonomous vehicle can be sent in to investigate.

"In very deep oceanic water," Houston said, "nothing happens fast."

The Ocean Shield had been using a U.S. Navy towed pinger locater when it detected the sounds on two occasions over a period totaling more than two and a half hours in the northern part of the defined search area. The first ping was detected for approximately two hours and 20 minutes, and the second for 13 minutes on the ship's return trip over the same area.

If the Ocean Shield manages to pick up the signal again, the crew will launch a Bluefin-21 autonomous sub that can dive to about 14,800 feet and scan for wreckage. Given the fact that the sea floor in the area is approximately 14,800 feet deep -- and even deeper in some spots -- the sub will be operating to the limits of its capability, Houston said.

The plane vanished with 239 people on board, setting off an international search that started off Vietnam and then shifted to the southern Indian Ocean as information from radar and satellite data was refined.

The length of the search and lack of any information on the cause of the plane to go so far off course has transfixed the world.

After a month-long hunt for answers filled with dead ends, Monday's news brought fresh hope. The flight data and cockpit voice recordings are the key to unraveling exactly what happened to Flight 370 and why.

But there is little time left to find the devices, which have beacons that emit "pings" so they can be more easily found. However, the beacons' batteries last only about a month. Tuesday marks exactly one month since the plane disappeared.

"I would want more confirmation before we say this is it," Houston said. "Without wreckage, we can't say it's definitely here. We've got to go down and have a look and hopefully we'll find it somewhere in the area that we narrowed to."

Geoff Dell, discipline leader of accident investigation at Central Queensland University in Australia, said it would be "coincidental in the extreme" for the sounds to have come from anything other than an aircraft's black box.

"If they have a got a legitimate signal, and it's not from one of the other vessels or something, you would have to say they are within a bull's roar," he said. "There's still a chance that it's a spurious signal that's coming from somewhere else and they are chasing a ghost, but it certainly is encouraging that they've found something to suggest they are in the right spot."

Meanwhile, the British ship HMS Echo, was using sophisticated sound-locating equipment to try to determine whether two separate sounds heard by a Chinese ship about 345 miles away from the Ocean Shield were related to the plane. The patrol vessel Haixun 01 detected a brief "pulse signal" on Friday and a second signal on Saturday.

The crew of the Chinese ship reportedly picked up the signals using a sonar device called a hydrophone dangled over the side of a small boat -- something experts said was technically possible but extremely unlikely. The equipment aboard the British and Australian ships is dragged slowly behind each vessel over long distances and is considered far more sophisticated.

The search effort was also continuing on the ocean surface Monday. Twelve planes and 14 ships were searching three designated zones, one of which overlaps with the Ocean Shield's underwater search. All of the previous surface searches have found only fishing equipment or other sea trash floating in the water, but have found no debris related to the Malaysian plane.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

[erickpl]

Amazing how these pings are being found as the batteries are supposed to be dying...

I swear, if I didn't read technothrillers, I'd swear this all was a plot line from them.

How possible would it be to drop something in the water to emit pings like the voice recorder or black box would just long enough to make people think it was what they were looking for, then stop transmitting? Would it be enough make people think it really did go down in the ocean?

I'm still thinking it is sitting in a hangar somewhere in one of the 'stans, being repainted and repurposed into something a LOT more sinister than a passenger plane with really crappy coach seating.

Even if they pull these devices from the water, until there is debris found that can be 100% identified and confirmed as being from the missing 777, I'll have my doubts. And I'm not one for conspiracy theories. Overactive imagination? Oh yeah, but conspiracy theories? Not usually.

Clive Cussler could REALLY have fun with this one as the basis for one of his stories...

[Mike Mercury]

even if they find the plane under water... that doesn't verify when it crashed.



Did it crash as it ran out of fuel on the same day it took off? Did it crash in that spot a few days later (after the plane landed somewhere... uloaded... and was refueled & took off again).

Were the DFR's re-written with data to hide the fact the plane crashed days afterwards?

Ya know, no one was looking in that spot until about 2-3 weeks after Flt. 370 disappeared.

[VITE1]

Originally Posted by Mike Mercury

even if they find the plane under water... that doesn't verify when it crashed.



Did it crash as it ran out of fuel on the same day it took off? Did it crash in that spot a few days later (after the plane landed somewhere... uloaded... and was refueled & took off again).

Were the DFR's re-written with data to hide the fact the plane crashed days afterwards?

Ya know, no one was looking in that spot until about 2-3 weeks after Flt. 370 disappeared.

The problem with all conspiracy theory's is that most people cannot keep a secret longer than a few seconds. Plus you are dealing with People who you never trust so you set up ways to protect yourself in case your co conspirators try to have you whacked.

[Rob]

So now they seem to have lost the signal from the airliner...

[VITE1]

Originally Posted by Dixievet

So now they seem to have lost the signal from the airliner...

[VITE1]

Malaysia plane search teams relocate signals in Indian Ocean | Fox News

Malaysia plane search teams relocate signals in Indian Ocean
Australian officials said Thursday that they are confident they are searching in the right area for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet after more signals were detected in a 17-mile area in the south Indian Ocean.

Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency coordinating the search, said that the Australian Navy's Ocean Shield had picked up two more underwater signals. However, the newly detected signals did not narrow the search area enough to dispatch a submersible vehicle to search for wreckage.

"I think that we're looking in the right area, but I'm not prepared to say, to confirm, anything until such time as somebody lays eyes on the wreckage," he said. "I'm now optimistic that we will find the aircraft, or what is left of the aircraft, in the not-too-distant future. We need to visually identify aircraft wreckage before we can confirm with certainty that this is the final resting place of MH370."

The signals detected 1,020 miles northwest of Perth are the strongest indication yet that the plane crashed and is now lying at the bottom of the ocean in the area where the search is now focused.

Finding the black boxes quickly is a matter of urgency because their locator beacons have a battery life of only about a month, and Tuesday marked exactly one month since the plane vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board.

If the beacons blink off before the black boxes' location can be determined, finding them in such deep water -- about 4,500 meters, or 15,000 feet -- would be an immensely difficult, if not impossible, task.

The Ocean Shield first detected the sounds late Saturday and early Sunday before losing them, and Houston said the ship relocated the signals twice on Tuesday.

"We need to visually identify aircraft wreckage before we can confirm with certainty that this is the final resting place of MH370."
- Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency coordinating the search

The ship is equipped with a U.S. Navy towed pinger locator that is designed to pick up signals from a plane's black boxes.

To assist the Ocean Shield, the Australian Navy on Wednesday began using parachutes to drop a series of buoys in a pattern near where the signals were last heard.

Royal Australian Navy Commodore Peter Leavy said each buoy will dangle an underwater listening device called a hydrophone about 1,000 feet below the surface. The hope, he said, is the buoys will help better pinpoint the location of the signals.

Houston acknowledged searchers were running out of time, and noted that the signals picked up on Tuesday were weaker and briefer than the ones heard over the weekend, suggesting that the batteries might be dying. The two signals detected on Saturday lasted 2 hours, 20 minutes and 13 minutes, respectively. The two sounds heard Tuesday lasted just 5 minutes, 30 seconds and 7 minutes.

"So we need to, as we say in Australia, `make hay while the sun shines,"' Houston said.

Picking up the sound again is crucial to narrowing the search area so a small, unmanned submarine can be deployed to create a sonar map of a potential debris field on the seafloor. The sub, dubbed Bluefin 21, takes six times longer to cover the same area as the pinger locator, which is pulled behind the boat at a depth of 3,000 meters.

U.S. Navy Capt. Mark Matthews said the detections indicate the device emitting the pings is somewhere within about a 12-mile radius. Still, he said, that equates to a 500-square-mile chunk of the ocean floor.

That amounts to trying to find a desktop computer in a city the size of Los Angeles, and would take the sub about six weeks to two months to canvass. So it makes more sense to continue using the towed pinger locator to zero in on a more precise location, Matthews said.

"It's certainly a man-made device emitting that signal," he said. "And I have no explanation for what other component could be there."

The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on a trip from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing has sparked one of aviation's biggest mysteries. The search has shifted from waters off of Vietnam, to the Strait of Malacca and then to waters in the southern Indian Ocean as data from radar and satellites was further analyzed.

The weakening of the signals could indicate that the batteries were reaching the end of their life, or that the device was farther away, Matthews said. Temperature, water pressure or the saltiness of the sea could also be factors.

Houston said a decision had not yet been made on how long searchers would wait after the final sound was heard before the sub was deployed, saying only that time was "not far away."

"Hopefully in a matter of days, we will be able to find something on the bottom that might confirm that this is the last resting place of MH370," he said.

The Bluefin sub's sonar can scan only about 100 meters and it can "see" with lights and cameras only a few meters. The maximum depth it can dive is 4,500 meters, and some areas of the search zone are deeper.

Search crews are also contending with a thick layer of silt on the seafloor that can both hide any possible wreckage and distort the sounds emanating from the black boxes that may be resting there, said Leavy, who is helping to lead the search.

Despite the challenges still facing search crews, those involved in the hunt were buoyed by the Ocean Shield's findings.

"I'm an engineer, so I don't talk emotions too much," Matthews said. "But certainly when I received word that they had another detection, you feel elated. You're hopeful that you can locate the final resting place of the aircraft and bring closure to all the families involved."

The multinational search for the plane began shortly after it vanished with 239 people on board in the early hours of March 8 while en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing. The search began off the coast of Vietnam, near where civilian air traffic controllers last had contact with the flight, before shifting to the coast of western Malaysia, before finally settling in the southern Indian Ocean, approximately 1,000 miles off the coast of Western Australia.

Malaysian authorities have previously said that satellite data appears to indicate that the plane did go down near the present search area, raising speculation as to what happened to drive the plane so far from its intended flight path.