Australia’s PM Abbott confident signals are coming from MH370 black box

Corridors where an Inmarsat satellite is calculated to have received the last ACARS signal or ping from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (Wikipedia photo)

PERTH, Australia — Australia’s prime minister said on Friday authorities are confident that a series of underwater signals detected in a remote patch of the Indian Ocean are coming from the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.

Tony Abbott told reporters in Shanghai, China, that search crews had significantly narrowed down the area they were hunting for the source of the sounds, first detected on Saturday.

“It’s been very much narrowed down because we’ve now had a series of detections, some for quite a long period of time,” Abbott said. “Nevertheless, we’re getting to the stage where the signal from what we are very confident is the black box is starting to fade. We are hoping to get as much information as we can before the signal finally expires.”

The plane’s black boxes, or flight data and cockpit voice recorders, could help solve the mystery of why Flight 370 veered so far off course when it vanished on March 8 on a trip from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing.