U.S. Navy’s Towed Pinger Locator Detects Possible Signs of MH370

U.S. Navy’s Towed Pinger Locator

950 miles northwest of Perth, Australia, the U.S. Navy’s towed pinger locator (TPL) may have found the tell-tale pings of the black box from MH370.

“The detected signals are consistent with sounds that would come from a black box,” according to the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet.

While operating their TPL from the supply vessel Ocean Shield, the U.S. Navy’s team notes they heard consecutive pings at one second intervals with varying signal strength “as would be expected with the ship moving toward then away from the signal.”

In addition the Navy notes that after lowering the TPL to a depth of 3,000 meters, they detected two distinctly different pings at the same frequency, but in different locations.  “This would be consistent with the MH370 black box because the plane had both a flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder,” according to the Navy’s statement.

Over the next 24 hours, the U.S. Navy plans to use a Bluefin-21 Sidescan Sonar to get a picture of any potential wreckage.  They note that the data gathered so far is inconclusive.

Updated: April 8, 2014 (Originally published April 6, 2014)

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