MH370 search crew confident over latest signals, says Australian PM

Australian search teams are confident that the underwater signals picked up in the southern Indian Ocean this week are possibly from flight MH370’s black box, the country’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott has said.

Speaking in China, Abbott said that the authorities have further narrowed down the search area and are hoping to gather as much data as possible before the signal finally expires.

"Confidence in the approximate position of the black box is not the same as recovering wreckage from almost 4.5km beneath the sea or finally determining all that happened on that flight," Abbott said.

An Australian ship, Ocean Shield, has picked up four signals that are possibly from the flight recorders during the week. The fifth signal, which is an audio signal, was picked up by an Australian aircraft in the same area as the four previous detections on 10 April.

Meanwhile, the head of the Australian team coordinating the search effort Angus Houston said that analysis of audio data confirmed that the latest ping was unlikely to be related to MH370’s black box.

"On the information I have available to me, there has been no major breakthrough in the search for MH370," Houston said. "I will provide a further update if, and when, further information becomes available."

Although, the systems on the Malaysian aircraft’s cockpit voice and flight data recorders were built to emit signals for 30 days, experts believe that the devices may continue to work for two more weeks depending on the state of the batteries.

Teams from more than a dozen countries have been searching the southern Indian Ocean for traces of the ill-fated aircraft, which disappeared off radar screens an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur on 8 March.

Recently, Japan’s Maritime Self-Defence Force has sent two P3 Orion aeroplanes to Perth’s Pearce Air Force Base to join the search.