Malaysia Airlines MH370 Search Effort Continues: Are Black Box Batteries Already Dead?

The massive search operation for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight in the Indian Ocean continued on Saturday even with no new pings having been detected since Thursday.

"Work continues in an effort to narrow the underwater search area for when the autonomous underwater vehicle is deployed. There have been no confirmed acoustic detections over the past 24 hours," the Australian search agency said in a statement.

The search operations over the southern Indian ocean is getting tricky with each passing day as the batteries of the black box recorder of MH370 have already crossed their 30-day lifespan. Search agencies cannot send the underwater drone until they locate any possible wreckage 4000 feet under the seabed.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has warned that acoustic signals are 'rapidly fading' and the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 may have to continue for a long time.

"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 reporters in Beijing.

He again warned against over-optimism in the search operation of the ill-fated flight and described the task as a 'very lengthy' process.

"Trying to locate anything 4,500 metres (15,000 feet) beneath the surface of the ocean, about 1,000km (620 miles) from land is a massive, massive task," he said.

"Given that the signal from the black box is rapidly fading, what we are now doing is trying to get as many detections as we can so that we can narrow the search area down to as small an area as possible."

Meanwhile, new information surrounding the criminal investigation of the missing jet has now surfaced. The co-pilot of the missing Malaysian flight, Fariq Abdul Hamid, reportedly attempted to make a mid-flight phone call from his mobile phone when the Boeing 777 was flying low over Penang, the New Straits Times reported today.

The call ended abruptly possibly "because the aircraft was fast moving away from the (telecommunications) tower", an inside source told the daily. However it is still unclear if the call was a desperate attempt for help.

The Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 mysteriously vanished mid-air hours after taking off on March 8 with 239 on board. The disappearance of the plane triggered many theories and a massive multinational search operation was launched which ultimately zeroed in on the remote Southern Indian Ocean as the flight's final resting place.

Meanwhile, many countries have sent in their super efficient ships and planes to help search for the black box of the missing plane so as to unravel one of the deepest aviation mysteries of all time.

Check here for photos of the Royal New Zealand Air Force's search efforts over the Indian Ocean.