Time is running out in the desperate hunt for the recorders that can unravel the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
More than three weeks after the Boeing 777 vanished with 239 people aboard, investigators are racing the clock to locate the plane’s black boxes.
Once lost, the cockpit voice and flight data recorders emit a telltale “ping” for up to 30 days. Their batteries will likely die April 7.
Hope emerged Saturday, as a Chinese plane scouring the southern Indian Ocean spotted what appeared to be white, red and orange debris. The plane’s exterior was white, orange and blue.
The crew dropped buoys with dye to mark three debris fields.
“We found an L-shaped debris in orange color” that seems to match an area below the plane’s right wing, crew member Wang Zhenwu told China’s CCTV, according to CNN. “Then within . . . three minutes, we found a [striped] object.”
With a search area the size of Poland and an ocean littered with garbage, searchers have met with repeated disappointment.
Two ships retrieved other pieces of debris early Saturday, but the items were nothing more than garbage, according to reports citing China’s state-run media.
As if the search of the surface wasn’t daunting enough, the seafloor contains a four-mile-deep trench — “a drop about twice that of the Grand Canyon,” oceanographer David Ferreira told The Sunday Times of London.
If the black boxes can be recovered in such treacherous surroundings, they could be the key to understanding what happened — they would have captured the pilots’ cockpit and radio chatter and would have recorded any electronic instructions to aircraft systems as well as the plane’s engine performance.
As search efforts renewed Sunday morning, the Australian naval ship Ocean Shield was expected to deploy with search gear from the US Navy on board, including a device capable of detecting black boxes to a depth of 20,000 feet.
But it could take days for the Ocean Shield to reach the search area, now about 1,000 miles off the western coast of Australia.
Eight planes from four countries, including China, Japan, New Zealand and Australia, which is overseeing the search, have been flying over the waters to try and narrow the search .
Flight 370 left Kuala Lumpur on March 8, en route to Beijing, and fell off radar screens about an hour later.
Last week, Malaysia Airlines sent relatives of the passengers and crew a text saying they were assuming all on board the flight had been lost.
“We must now accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the southern Indian Ocean,” the text read.