MH370: Underwater sound waves 'could help find missing planes like Malaysia Airlines craft'

Underwater sound waves could be used to help locate aeroplanes that go missing at sea such as Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, researchers have said.

A team from Cardiff University has developed a method using underwater microphones, or hydrophones, to find out the precise time and location that objects fall into the ocean.

The members say it could be used to locate meteorites, satellites or aircraft parts that may have entered the ocean, and to locate underwater explosions, landslides or the epicentres of earthquakes far out at sea.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and the 239 people on board disappeared soon into its flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014.

A 52-day surface search covered an area of several million square miles in the Indian Ocean west of Australia, before an underwater search mapped 274,000 square miles of seabed at depths of up to 20,000ft.

But the search failed to uncover the fate of the plane.

The hunt, abandoned in January after almost three years, included analysis of satellite imagery and ocean drifts after debris from the aircraft washed ashore on islands in the eastern Indian Ocean and the east coast of Africa.

The Cardiff University team was first motivated by a desire to find out more about the missing Boeing 777, said co-author of the study Dr Davide Crivelli, from Cardiff University's School of Engineering.

He said the team found two "remarkably weak signals" around the suggested flight path of MH370.

"Though we've located two points around the time of MH370's disappearance from an unknown source, we cannot say with any real certainty that these have any association with the aircraft," said Dr Crivelli.

"What we do know is that the hydrophones picked up remarkably weak signals at these locations and that the signals, according to our calculations, accounted for some sort of impact in the Indian Ocean.

"All of this information has been passed on to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau and we anticipate that both now, and in the future, this new source of information could be used in conjunction with a whole host of other data that is at the disposal of the authorities."