"More than likely they
are reaching end of life or already have. We're at Day 37. ... If (a
beacon) is still going it is very, very quiet at this point," Jeff
Densmore told CNN's "State of the Union with Candy Crowley."
Densmore, director of engineering for Dukane Seacom,
said his company has been helping search officials interpret the data
from recent audio signals in the southern Indian Ocean, where the plane
is thought to have been when it reached the end of its fuel supply.
The signals were
definitely man-made, he said, but there is no way to be 100% sure they
came from the flight data recorder in the tail of the plane or the
cockpit voice recorder until wreckage or the so-called black boxes are
found on the ocean floor.
The batteries that send out the signals were certified to last 30 days, a deadline that's already passed.
"We are in a transition
period at the moment," retired Lt. Col. Michael Kay of the Royal Air
Force told CNN, referring to the fact that searchers will soon have to
give up hunting with pinger locators and switch to sonar. "We know that
the (data recorder) batteries last between 30 and 40 days."
Black boxes are vital to determine cause
A top Malaysian official
on Sunday reaffirmed the importance of finding the black boxes from the
Boeing 777 if the mystery of the missing airliner is ultimately to be
solved.
For instance, it would be
difficult for investigators to clear crew or passengers until the two
recorders are located, Malaysia's acting transport minister,
Hishammuddin Hussein, said at a news conference in Kuala Lumpur.
The inspector general of
police has found nothing suspicious about the passenger manifest,
Hishammuddin said, but "he did not say that they all had been cleared on
the four issues that the police are still investigating, which is the
possible hijacking, issues of terrorism, psychological and personal
problems.
"That is an ongoing
thing, and I don't think the IGP would have meant that they have all
been cleared, because unless we find more information, specifically on
data in the black box, I don't think any chief of police would be in the
position" to declare the cases cleared, he said.
The plane's senior
pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, has received a lot of attention in the
media in the wake of the disaster. Investigators believe it was his
voice speaking the last words heard from Flight 370, "Good night,
Malaysian 370."
In recent years Zaharie
was active on social media, posting videos in which he explained how to
optimize an air conditioning system to reduce electricity bills and
showing photos of his many gadgets. He loved food and cooking.
He was also passionate
about politics, urging people to vote out the current Malaysian
government. But nothing in his social media posts would seem to suggest
foul play in MH370's disappearance.
Still seeking pings
The search continued
Sunday, 36 days after the plane carrying 239 people vanished from radar
screens early March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
After a week during
which the search area in the southern Indian Ocean shrank each day, it
grew significantly on Sunday -- by almost 40%.
The Australian Maritime
Safety Authority said teams would conduct a visual search of
approximately 22,200 square miles (57,500 square kilometers). The center
of the search area lies about 1,370 miles (2,200 kilometers) northwest
of Perth, Australia.
Up to 11 military
aircraft, one civil aircraft and 14 ships assisted in Sunday's search
for the missing airliner, the Australia's Joint Agency Coordination
Centre said.
The search area has
shifted each day as officials look at new data and study the ocean
currents. Still, no debris has been found and promising audio signals
heard days ago were far apart.
Jeff Wise, an aviation analyst, said Sunday's enlarging search area makes observers wonder.
"It doesn't really inspire confidence (in the people running the search)," he told CNN's "New Day."
He said the fact that
searchers haven't heard pings in five days makes him wonder whether it's
time to send down underwater vehicles with sidescan sonar.
"Unless they have some
other information that we are not aware of, it seems like if they really
did think this was the plane that they would go down and really try to
locate it," he said.
On Saturday, searchers
aboard the Australian vessel Ocean Shield continued towing the ping
locator -- referred to as a TPL -- at a walking pace through the water
in hopes of picking up new signals from either or both of the locator
beacons that were attached to the plane's cockpit voice recorder and
flight data recorder, said Cmdr. William Marks, the U.S. Navy commander
in charge of the American presence involved in the search effort.
Once the searchers
conclude there is no hope that the batteries could still power the
beacons, searchers will lower into the water a sonar device called the
Bluefin-21 to scour the ocean floor. The Bluefin's pace is slower than
that of a TPL, Marks said.
Four pings, one dud
On April 5, the towed
pinger locator detected two sets of underwater pulses of a frequency
close to that used by the locator beacons. Three days later, last
Tuesday, it reacquired the signals twice.
All four signals were within 17 miles of one another.
A fifth ping, detected
Thursday by a sonobuoy dropped from an airplane, is "unlikely to be
related to the aircraft black boxes," Australian chief search
coordinator Angus Houston said a day later.
