After a month of failed hunting and finding debris that turned out to be ordinary flotsam, an Australian ship detected faint pings deep in the Indian Ocean in what an official called the "most promising lead" yet in the search for Flight 370, according to the Washington Post.
The Ocean Shield, an Australian ship towing sophisticated U.S. Navy listening equipment, detected two distinct, long-lasting sounds underwater that are consistent with the pings from an aircraft's "black boxes," the Post reported.
"We are cautiously hopeful that there will be a positive development in the next few days, if not hours," Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said in the capital of Kuala Lumpur, according to the Post.
The British ship HMS Echo was using sophisticated sound-locating equipment to determine whether two separate sounds heard by the Chinese patrol vessel Haixun 01 were related to Flight 370, the Post reported. The Ocean Shield picked up its signals late Saturday night and early Sunday morning.
China's official Xinhua News Agency reported late Saturday that the signal detected by the Haixun crew was pulsing at 37.5 kilohertz, which is the same frequency emitted by flight data recorders, according to the Post.
Little time is left to locate the flight recorders, whose locator beacons have a battery life of about a month, the Post reported. Tuesday marks exactly one month since the Malaysia Airlines plane disappeared.
The first ping lasted two hours and 20 minutes before it was lost, according to the Post. The ship then turned around and picked up a signal again and recorded two distinct "pinger returns" that lasted 13 minutes, head of the Australian agency coordinating the search, Angus Houston, said.
Navy specialists were urgently trying to pick up the signal detected Sunday by the Ocean Shield so they can triangulate its position and go to the next step of sending an unmanned miniature submarine into the depths to look for any plane wreckage, the Post reported.
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 flight recorder, according to the Post.
Houston said the signals picked up by the Ocean Shield were stronger and lasted longer than faint signals a Chinese ship reported hearing about 345 miles south in the remote search zone off Australia's west coast, the Post reported.
