Investigators who are looking into the disappearance of Flight MH370 believe co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid made a “desperate call from his mobile phone as the plane was flying low near Penang,” reports Malaysia’s New Straits Times. The newspaper cites anonymous sources who claim the attempted phone call was picked up by a cellphone tower but ended abruptly. “The telco’s (telecommunications company’s) tower established the call that he was trying to make. On why the call was cut off, it was likely because the aircraft was fast moving away from the tower and had not come under the coverage of the next one,” according to a source cited by the newspaper. Another source, however, says that the signal linked to the cellphone could have been the result of the co-pilot switching on his phone rather than making a call.
Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott warned that the signals thought to be from the plane’s black boxes are “rapidly fading” and finding the plane will involve a “massive, massive task.” Batteries in the black boxes are already past their normal 30-day lifespan, points out Reuters. The goal of investigators is to try to narrow down the search area as much as possible. At the very least, there is optimism that the signals detected in recent days do belong to at least one of the two black boxes from the missing plane, reports CNN.
