BALTIMORE, Maryland April 10, 2014 - More "pings" from a suspected set of black boxes on the missing Malaysian Airlines Jet have been detected, this time by an "Australian air force P-3 Orion, which has been dropping sound-locating buoys into the water near where the original sounds were heard," the Canadian Broadcasting Company reports within the last hour.
Retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston said the plane "picked up a "possible signal" that may be from a man-made source, "The acoustic data will require further analysis overnight," Houston said.
Now, with each detected "ping," search leaders are able to shrink the search area, which is the possible area where the missing jet is suspected of having crashed and sank to the bottom of the Indian Ocean, about 1,000 miles west of Perth, Australia.
Searchers are getting ever closer to the moment when they will be able to launch an unmanned submarine to search the bottom of the ocean in the area defined by the pings. If the plane is there, the submarine will photograph it. If the debris can be visualized, the sub and other equipment will then attempt to bring up the part of the plane where the so-called black boxes are embedded.
The Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777, with 239 persons on board, went missing on March 8, 2014. It lost contact with air traffic controllers some 40 minutes into its flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing, China. Using military radar and satellite data, searchers were able to determine that the plane veered off course immediately after its last call to ground controllers, then flew south for up to seven hours before crashing into the southern part of the Indian Ocean.
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