MH370 Two ships and an aircraft will be tasked to investigate the signal that the Chinese patrol vessel Haixun 01 detected yesterday, said the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC).

They are the British hydrographic survey vessel HMS Echo , Australian vessel ADV Ocean Shield , and a Royal Australian Air Force aircraft.

However, Ocean Shield has also detected an ‘acoustic event’ at a separate part of the ocean and will investigate this first before continuing. No details are available regarding the sounds detected.

“This has only happened in the last 90 minutes, we heard a report back from the Ocean Shield - the towed pinger locator (TPL) operators aboard there - they have picked up a detection,” Joint Task Force 658 commander Peter Leavy told a press conference in Perth at 11.30am.

HMS Echo will arrive in the area in 14 hours, he says, while Ocean Shield will take at least until mid-afternoon to decide whether to remain in the area or join HMS Echo.

It will then take Ocean Shield a full day to make the journey, plus the two to three hours to retrieve and then redeploy its TPL, which is tethered at the end of a six-kilometre-long cable.

Acoustic detections

Meanwhile, JACC chief Angus Houston said the signal detected by Haixun 01 yesterday is ‘promising’ because it had detected the same signal on Friday, just two kilometres away from where yesterday’s detection was made.

However, he warned that these acoustic detections, as well as many more that would come in the future, should be treated as ‘unverified’ until told otherwise, just like the visual search at the beginning of the operation.

“We will go through a similar process (of verification) underwater. Underwater, the environment is quite difficult.

“There are lots of occasions when noises will be transmitted over long distances depending on the temperatures layers in the water and so on. There is a complexity about working underwater,” he said, adding that the sea is some 4.5 kilometres deep at Haixun 01 ’s location.

He adds that the signals detected thus far have been fleeting, whereas the search ships should have been able to hear it longer if they were close to the black box.

Houston also announced that new satellite analysis have slightly revised MH370’s likely flight path, suggesting that it had flown a little further before hitting the water.

“The whole of the existing search area remains the most likely area that the aircraft entered the water, but based on the new advice the southern area now has a higher priority,” he says.

To a question, he replied that the southern area is also where Haixun 01 had been searching.