SHANGHAI, China — Australia’s prime minister said Friday that authorities are confident a series of underwater signals detected in a remote patch of the Indian Ocean are coming from the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.
Tony Abbott said search crews had significantly narrowed down the area they were hunting for the source of the sounds, first detected Saturday.
“It’s been very much narrowed down because we’ve now had a series of detections, some for quite a long period of time,” Abbott said. “Nevertheless, we’re getting to the stage where the signal from what we are very confident is the black box is starting to fade. We are hoping to get as much information as we can before the signal finally expires.”
The plane’s black boxes, or flight data and cockpit voice recorders, could help solve the mystery of why Flight 370 veered so far off course when it vanished March 8 on a trip from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing.
An Australian air force P-3 Orion, which has been dropping sonar buoys into the water near where four sounds were heard earlier, picked up a “possible signal” Thursday, said Angus Houston, coordinator of the hunt off Australia’s west coast.
