Faint beeps heard

Press, 29 June 1985, Page 10

Faint beeps heard

NZPA-AP Cork Investigators said yesterday that faint, intermittent signals had been detected near where an Air-India jumbo jet crashed on Sunday but it is not certain if they are being emitted by the missing flight recorders. A spokesman at the Royal Navy’s command centre at Northwood, north-west of London, said that H.M.S. Challenger “has intercepted a weak and intermittent signal but we can’t confirm that it is from the flight recorders”. The crash killed all 329 people aboard the Air-India flight. If the flight recorders can be recovered from the I.6km-deep sea-bed, they could provide information on the cause of the crash,

which may have been due to sabotage. The Challenger “has not been able to hold the signal long enough to locate and analyse it,” said the spokesman. “They may be on to something,” he said, "but we’re not certain it (the signal) is the one we’re looking for,” he said. Mr S. S. Sidhu, of India’s Civil Aviation Ministry, who is leading the investigation into the cause of the world’s third-worst aviation disaster, said that he was told by “a technical group” from the Challenger “that faint signals have been received”. “Possibly, the flight data recorder is the source,” he said. “It seems to be true.”