Hunt For 'Black Box Signals'
Search teams hunting for the missing Malaysia Airlines Plane are Scrambling to relocate the "pings" that could be from the aircraft's black boxes.
An Australian ship has been unable to re-locate the signals, or 'pings', first heard at the weekend in its search for the black box of flight MH370.
Search coordinators say they will continue to trawl the Indian Ocean for several days before they consider sending down a mini submarine to investigate.
The Australian ship Ocean Shield picked up the pinging sound twice, on Saturday and Sunday, but has since been unable to hear it again.
Search coordinator Angus Houston and Australia's defence minister David Johnston both said re-locating the ping was the best-case scenario for the search.
Mr Houston said: "There have been no further contacts with any transmission and we need to continue that for several days right up to the point at which there's absolutely no doubt that the batteries will have expired.
"If we don't get any further transmissions, we have a reasonably large search area of the bottom of the ocean to prosecute and that will take a long, long time. It's very slow, painstaking work."
He said narrowing the search area first was critical.
He added: "It is a large area for a small submersible that has a very narrow field of search, and of course, it is literally crawling along the bottom of the ocean.
"That's why its so important to get another transmission and we need to continue until there's absolutely no chance the device is still transmitting."
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