Malaysia Airlines failed to service pingers on blackboxes?

Washington: The acoustic pingers on the missing Malaysia Airlines plane`s two black boxes were due for overhauls and battery replacements in 2012 but were never returned to their manufacturer, according to a media report.

Anish Patel, president of pinger manufacturer Dukane Seacom of Sarasota, Florida, said the US National Transportation Safety Board has told his company that it manufactured the pingers on the Boeing 777-200`s black boxes, formally known as the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder. The devices were manufactured in late 2005 and late 2006 and were due for overhauls and new batteries in 2012, Patel, the Indian-origin top executive, said. Also Read: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370`s search: As it happened on Sunday But "we have no record of those units ever coming back for a battery replacement," he told CNN. It leaves three possibilities, Patel said: The airline could have replaced the old pingers with new ones, it could have had another company perform the necessary maintenance, or it could have let the scheduled maintenance lapse, meaning the pingers would have a shortened battery life. If the original batteries remain in the pingers, the battery life probably will have dropped from the required 30 days to 20 or 25 days, Patel, said. Commenting on reports of a number of underwater sounds detected in the southern Indian Ocean and whether it came from the flight recorder of MH370, Patel said: The signal reported "is the standard beacon frequency" for the plane`s cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder. But he said additional equipment should be deployed quickly to the area from where the signals were detected. "I`d like to see some additional assets on site quickly -- maybe some sonobuoys," Patel said, referring to 13- centimeter-long sonar systems that are dropped from aircraft or ships. Malaysia Airlines did not respond last week to a question from CNN about whether the pingers on Flight 370 are compliant. But in an earlier e-mail about the airline`s storage practices, the company said, "We are unaware of any issue with the ULB (pinger) or its batteries." "This battery is not replaceable," the airline said. "The battery is built-in inside the (pinger) and installed by OEM -- Original Equipment Manufacturer." The CEO Malaysia Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya yesterday said the acoustic pinger batteries on the airlines` black boxes were due for replacement in June 2014. "We can confirm there is a maintenance program. Batteries are replaced prior to expiration," he said. The Beijing-bound Malaysian Airlines plane carrying 239 people, including five Indians, veered off course and vanished on March 8. Authorities from around the world have been searching the remote areas in the Indian Ocean for the missing plane but have so far found nothing credible.