DHAKA: The searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner amid fears that batteries powering signals from the black box recorder on board may have died.

The Guardian reports on Saturday.

Search for Flight MH370 was resumed on Saturday, five weeks after the plane disappeared from radar screens.

Australian prime minister Tony Abbott said signals picked up during the search in the remote southern Indian Ocean, believed to be ‘pings’ from the black box recorders, were ‘rapidly fading’.

‘While we do have a high degree of confidence that the transmissions that we’ve been picking up are from flight MH370’s black box recorder, no one would underestimate the difficulties of the task still ahead of us,’ Abbott told a news conference in Beijing.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared soon after taking off on March 8 from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing with 227 passengers and 12 crew on board, triggering a multinational search that is now focused on the Indian Ocean.

Search officials say they are confident they know the approximate position of the black box recorder, although they have determined that the latest ‘ping’, picked up by searchers on Thursday, was not from the missing aircraft.

Batteries in the black box recorder are already past their normal 30-day life, making the search to find it on the murky sea bed all the more urgent. Once they are confident they have located it, searchers then plan to deploy a small unmanned ‘robot’ known as an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle.

‘Work continues in an effort to narrow the underwater search area for when the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle is deployed,’ the Australian agency coordinating the search said on Saturday.

BDST: 1445 HRS, APR 12, 2014