Rescue teams are believed to be within several kilometres of the black box and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott is ‘very confident’ it will be located in the near future.
Signals from the black box were detected by a ship in the Indian Ocean approximately 1,700km north west of Perth earlier this week and earlier today, Abbott revealed that there have since been a further series of detections that could narrow the search area down to within a kilometre.
Abbott didn’t want to elaborate on the search for the black box out of respect for the families of the passengers who were on board the flight, at least not until after meeting with Chinese President Xi in Beijing later today.
“We have very much narrowed down the search area … we have now had a series of detections, some for quite a long period of time,” Abbott is quoted as saying on news.com.au.
“It’s now getting to the stage that the signal from what we are very confident is from the black box is starting to fade.
“We are hoping to get as much information as we can before the signals finally expire.
“We have very much narrowed down the search area.
“I look forward to providing President Xi with the latest update when I meet him in Beijing this afternoon. We are confident that we know the position of the black box flight recorder to within about a kilometre.
“Still, confidence in the approximate position of the black box is not the same as recovering wreckage from almost four and half kilometres beneath the sea or finally determining all that happened on that flight.”
A graph published on the Washington Post this week illustrated just how difficult it could be to locate the wreckage from flight MH370, but the latest developments regarding the black box should go a long way to casting some light on what Abbott described as one of the “great mysteries of our time”.
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