The search for missing Malaysia plane has resumed on Thursday with a renewed sense of optimism.
The hunt for the plane resumed after Australian officials said they had detected two new "ping" signals that may have come from the plane's black box recorders, reports Reuters.
The mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which disappeared more than a month ago, has sparked the most expensive search and rescue operation in aviation history, but concrete information has proven frustratingly illusive.
The announcement on Wednesday that two new "ping" signals had been detected, bringing to four the number heard by a US Navy "Towed Pinger Locator"(TPL), led officials to say they were confident that they were homing in on the remains of the plane.
"I'm now optimistic that we will find the aircraft, or what's left of the aircraft, in the not too distant future," Angus Houston, the head of the Australian agency coordinating the search, told reporters in Perth.
The black boxes record cockpit data and may provide answers about what happened to the plane, which was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew when it vanished on March 8 and flew thousands of kilometres off its Kuala Lumpur-to-Beijing route.
But the batteries in the beacons have already reached the end of their 30-day expected life, making efforts to swiftly locate them on the murky ocean floor all the more critical.
