signal. the section detection on the return leg was held for approximately 13 minutes. on this occasion, two distinct pinger returns were audible. significantly, this would be with recorder and cockpit recorder. remain in the area and continues to remain in contact with the tow pinger electricitier. at this point he has not been able to reacquire the signals. this is the scary news, at any time the bears are batteries are expected to die. roger maynard is live in sydney. roger? well, hello, greta. this is obviously a major break through. the australian navy vessel picked up the pings in the last 4 hours. as one occasion it lasted
again, i would implore you to treat the information cautiously responsibly until such time as we can provide an unequivocal determination. the australian vessel, the ocean shield detects not one by two separate acustic events the first lasting a total of two hours and 20 minutes and the second lasting a total of 13 minutes. both, houston said, is consistent with a cockpit recorder and inflight data recorder. there he is urgenting caution until they have actual physical wreck ed wreckage, the ocean shield
location which would seem to suggest, as you yourself have pointed out, i believe, that maybe these were coming one from the flight data recorder, one from the cockpit voice recorder, the two so-called black boxes. is that right? yeah, exactly. so that was just one of a number of encouraging signs from and this would have been the 5th by now. so the first encouraging sign was the length of the detection that we had and then when we turned around we did hear it was essentially the same frequency but two different locations and which would correspondent with both the cockpit recorder and the flight data recorder. so that was a second encouraging sign. but once again, this is a 24-hour operation. we haven t quit since we initially heard these signals. we ve been going continuously around the clock and we haven t been able to reacquire them.
the black boxes pinger has a roughly 30-day battery life and that means it could stop transmitting a signal anytime now. jon: david piper is streaming live from bangkok, thailand. david, we have had plenty of false alarms before. how credible are these latest reports of sounds being detected underwater? reporter: hi, jon. yes, lots of false leads and a lots of wasted time. the australians are being very cautious but they re described it as a promising lead. perhaps the key to their statement they have given out today they suggested that they heard two different signals, two different pings. also on that they say it is consistent. so it means it was on the 39.5 gig hearts frequency. that is what the black boxes would be transmitted at. there were two black boxes on the plane. one for the cockpit recorder around the other to record flight data. so at the moment, that is the most promising lead they have
and you said that one is, paul? that s the pure pulse example. a single frequency for a burst of time, 2/10 of a second repeated every second. this is just a demonstration. and then you said there is another one that is a chip it can be programmed as well? this is a chirp where we have increased the frequency during the transmission. and you can see that it has a different wave shape. [ chirping ] and sound. so they re listening for anything that is similar to those two sounds. and if they had the same characteristics of either of those two sounds, depending on how the voice recorders and the cockpit recorder, depending on how they were programmed. exactly. then you would know if it s a signature of that and not just some something that happens to be on a similar frequency. that s correct, exactly, exactly.