PERTH, Australia (AP) – A day after expressing optimism about the hunt for the missing Malaysian jet, Australia’s leader warned today that the massive search would likely continue “for a long time”.
“No one should underestimate the difficulties of the task still ahead of us,” Prime Minister Tony Abbott said in Beijing, on the last day of his China trip.
Abbott appeared to couch his comments from a day earlier, when he met in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping to brief him on the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which was carrying 239 people – most of them Chinese – when it disappeared March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
After analysing satellite data, officials believe the plane flew off course for an unknown reason and went down in the southern Indian Ocean off Australia’s west coast.
Abbott said yesterday that he was “very confident” signals heard by an Australian ship towing a U.S. Navy device that detects flight recorder pings were coming from the missing Boeing 777’s black boxes.
He continued to express this belief today, but with no new underwater signals detected in the past few days and electronic transmissions from the black boxes fading fast, Abbott said the job of finding the plane remained arduous. Recovering the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders is essential for investigators to try to piece together what happened to Flight MH370.
We have “very considerably narrowed down the search area, but trying to locate anything 4.5 kilometres beneath the surface of the ocean about 1 000 kilometres from land is a massive, massive task, and it is likely to continue for a long time to come,” Abbott said.
“There’s still a lot more work to be done and I don’t want anyone to think that we are certain of success, or that success, should it come, is going to happen in the next week or even month. There’s a lot of difficulty and a lot of uncertainty left in this,” he said.
In Malaysia, Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein today refuted a front-page report in a local newspaper, the New Strait Times, that a signal from the mobile phone of co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid was picked up by a telecommunications tower near the Malaysian city of Penang shortly before the plane disappeared from radar. The newspaper report said the signal ended abruptly before contact was established.
Hishammuddin, who is also the acting transport minister, told the Malaysian national news agency Bernama that he should have been aware of the phone call earlier, but that wasn’t the case.
