Flight 370 Update: Mystery Sound Will Not Be Ruled Out, But Contractor Has Only 300 Days

The missing Malaysian Flight MH370 has become one of the most perplexing subjects to have stumped the world’s navies. Now the Australian Government has appointed a third-party contractor to locate the missing jet in the Indian Ocean, where it is believed to have crashed. Additionally, researchers have released news of a mystery sound they believe could be the one Flight 370 made upon impact with the water, reported CNN.

Australian researchers released an audio recording on Wednesday of an underwater sound that they say could possibly be related to the final moments of Flight 370. The sound was identified by researchers at Curtin University near Perth, Australia. They have been painstakingly studying the sound samples obtained from underwater listening devices. The team even managed to extract records from underwater nuclear explosion detection devices, as reported by The Inquisitr.

These devices have been used to detect faint sounds of remote explosions and fall under the purview of UN-chartered Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization’s International Monitoring System. Additionally the researchers also received data from another device that listens to whales and other marine life.

All the devices managed to simultaneously hear and record an ‘extremely low frequency sound’. Unfortunately, after plotting the trajectory of the sound, its origin appears nowhere close to the suspected crash site of flight 370. Alec Duncan with the University’s Centre for Marine Science and Technology (CMST) said,

“The team has calculated an ‘uncertainty box’ for the signal’s origin. It’s area that stretches some 4,000 kilometers in length from southeast to northwest across the Indian Ocean, and spans some 200 to 300 kilometers in width at its widest point.”

In other update, the Australian Government has decided to appoint a third-party contractor to search for the missing jetliner in the southern Indian Ocean. Tender documents released by the Australian government on Wednesday outline, for the first time, the requirements of the rebooted search – the largest of its type in history. But they also painfully highlight the continued uncertainty about the operation, including the terrain of the seabed and even the area to be scoured using high-tech sonar equipment, reported The Wall Street Journal.

The contract offers only 300 days as the time-limit to hunt for flight 370; meanwhile, there has been no conclusive establishment of the plane’s tentative location. The winning contractor will have to scour an area of 60,000 square kilometers in hopes of finding the missing jet or at least some wreckage of it.

Flight 370 will have global experts coming up with a plan to search the area, including locating equipment and crew, within the next 26 days. Are these time-frames enough for searching for the missing jet?

[Image Credit | Bullit Marquez/AP]