Missing MH370: Jet search party 'within a kilometre' of black box resting place

A dozen military planes and 13 ships, including the Royal Navy’s HMS Echo, are involved in the hunt - but it is feared the black box could be 14,700ft under water

Search teams hunting for missing Flight MH370 are within a kilometre of its final resting place.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said crews had pinpointed the location of the Malaysia Airlines jet’s elusive black box after they traced a series of underwater ping signals.

Speaking on a state visit to China, he said: “We are confident that we know the position of the black box flight recorder to within about a kilometre.

“It is probably the most difficult search in human history.”

He said the search area – once 2.96 million square miles – was now “significantly narrowed” to a small area of the Indian Ocean 1,000 miles north west of Perth.

That’s 2,000 miles from where it was last tracked.

A dozen military planes and 13 ships, including the Royal Navy’s HMS Echo, are involved in the hunt.

But it is feared the black box could be 14,700ft under water.

Mr Abbott warned: “Confidence in the approximate position of the black box is not the same as recovering wreckage from almost 4.5km beneath the sea or finally ­determining all that happened.”

The breakthrough came as black box manufacturer Dukane Seacom revealed batteries powering the distress beacon could last for 40 days – rather than the 30 ­previously thought.

That means the signals could stop on Wednesday.

Mr Abbott added: “We’re getting to the stage where the signal from what we’re very confident is the black box is starting to fade.

"We’re hoping to get as much information as we can before it expires.”

It also emerged that the Beijing-bound Boeing 777 vanished from military radar 120 miles after it crossed back over the Malay ­Peninsula.

Official sources said the jet, which changed course after its last contact with ground control , also dipped to an altitude of between 4,000 and 5,000ft.

Aviation expert Peter Goelz said he believed whoever was at the controls was flying the aircraft over water deliberately.

He said: “It looks like – more and more – somebody in the cockpit was directing this plane and directing it away from land.

"And it looks as though they were doing it to avoid detection.”

Investigators are looking into whether the pilot or co-pilot deliberately crashed the jet.

The flight vanished on March 8 soon after it took off from Kuala Lumpur with 239 passengers and crew on board.

Daily Mirror