Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Mystery ( notice how the news is drying up ) - May 13 , 2014 -- FAST LOSING CREDIBILITY, MH370 searchers admit signals may NOT be from plane ......... Australia budgets RM272mil towards MH370 search over 2 years .......

Malaysia Chronicle .....

Tuesday, 13 May 2014 06:56

FAST LOSING CREDIBILITY, MH370 searchers admit signals may NOT be from plane

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Searchers preparing to resume the underwater hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 increasingly suspect that some of the electronic signals detected last month didn't come from the jetliner's black-box flight recorders, a senior Australian naval officer said.

The doubts—based on further acoustic analysis of the transmissions by Australian authorities over recent weeks—represent another potential setback in the two-month-old operation. An initial underwater search in the southern Indian Ocean has already failed to find any sign of the missing plane, while a costly air-and-ship search of the ocean's surface turned up only garbage.

Authorities in April clung to hope that electronic transmissions picked up by Australian naval vessel ADV Ocean Shield on four occasions on April 5 and April 8 would provide a breakthrough in the search. But authorities are increasingly considering only the two transmissions on April 5 as relevant to the search, Australian naval Commander James Lybrand, captain of the Ocean Shield search vessel, said in an interview late last week. Further analysis of the streams of signals detected three days later on April 8 has led authorities to doubt that they were from a man-made device, Cmdr. Lybrand said.

Each of the transmissions on April 8 were intermittent and at a frequency of around 27 kHz—much lower than the 37.5 kHz frequency that beacons are designed to emit, and also lower than the 33.3 kHz frequency of other transmissions on April 5. "As far as frequency goes, between 33 kHz and 27 kHz is a pretty large jump," Cmdr. Lybrand said.

The Joint Agency Coordination Center, the Australian agency leading the search, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Cmdr. Lybrand's remarks.

Authorities continue to believe that the two April 5 signals—including one held for 2 hours and 20 minutes—are consistent with black-box locator beacons. The signals from that day were detected at a slightly lower frequency than locator beacons are designed to emit, but officials have said this anomaly could have been caused by weakening batteries and the vagaries of deep-sea conditions.

Two other signal streams picked up in the search area had earlier been eliminated as leads, further highlighting the pitfalls of tracking possible noises from locator beacons in the open sea. Signals picked up early in the search by British navy vessel HMS Echo were later shown to have been noises from the ship itself, while a detection from a sonar buoy dropped in the ocean in early April was later determined to have come from a passing commercial freighter.

-foxnews.com

The Star Online.......

Published: Tuesday May 13, 2014 MYT 9:33:00 PM
Updated: Tuesday May 13, 2014 MYT 9:38:19 PM

Australia budgets RM272mil towards MH370 search over 2 years

A filepic of Australia's JACC chief coordinator Angus Houston with a map showing the search area for the MH370 plane.

   

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CANBERRA: Australia has committed up to AUD89.9mil (RM272.3mil) towards the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 over two years, budget papers released on Tuesday revealed.

Australia has been leading the hunt for the plane, which was carrying 239 people when it disappeared on March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

It is believed to have crashed into the southern Indian Ocean but despite a massive air and sea search, including underwater using a US navy submersible, no sign of any wreckage has yet been found.

"The government will provide up to AUD89.9mil over two years from 2013-14 as part of Australia's commitment to the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370," the papers stated.

Some AUD27.9mil (RM84.6mil) would be given to the defence department to pay for its activities up to June 30, 2014 in looking for the Boeing aircraft, while another AUD2mil (RM6.07mil) would be spent on the Joint Agency Coordination Centre established to liaise with key stakeholders.

"Further funding of up to AUD60mil (RM182mil) over two years from 2013-14 will be provided to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau for Australia's contribution to the next phase of the search," the papers said.

Australia has been coordinating the search for the plane - thought to have gone down in its search and rescue zone - in consultation with China, from where two-thirds of the passengers came, and Malaysia.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has vowed Australia will do all it can to find the jet, which mysteriously diverted from its course, saying he owed it to the families of those onboard to discover what happened.

While the aerial and sea surface searches have been scaled down, Australia is now working on the next phase which will involve using sophisticated equipment to scan the unmapped ocean bed some 4.5km below the surface.

Negotiations are underway to engage contractors to do this work, which Abbott has previously said could cost AUD60mil (RM182mil). - AFP