The underwater search for the flight recorders from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 could be completed in five to seven days, Australian officials said on Saturday.
A US navy deep-sea autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), Bluefin-21, is scouring a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean floor for signs of the plane, which disappeared from radars on 8 March with 239 people on board and is believed to have crashed in the area.
The underwater search has been narrowed to a circular area with a radius of 10km (6.2 miles) around the location from which one of four pings believed to have come from the recorders was detected on 8 April, officials said.
The huge international search-and-rescue effort for any physical evidence of the plane's wreckage, now in its seventh week, had so far proved fruitless.