Captains Zaharie Shah and Fariq Hamid are the two people who would know more than anyone else what really happened aboard flight MH370.

Captains Zaharie Shah and Fariq Hamid are the two people who would know more than anyone else what really happened aboard flight MH370.

UNDERWATER scientists have labelled the search for MH370 a “debacle” and say Prime Minister Tony Abbott was playing politics when he prematurely announced the black box pingers had been found.

The acoustic experts, who do not wish to be identified, said the four crucial signals detected by a US pinger locator were almost certainly not from the missing Malaysian Airlines plane’s black boxes, but from another man-made source.

They insisted that the signals were in the wrong frequency and detected too far apart to be from the boxes.

“As soon as I saw the frequency and the distance between the pings I knew it couldn’t be the aircraft pinger,” one scientist told News Corp Australia.

That conclusion is supported by the lack of success from a detailed search of the area conducted by the US deep sea drone ‘Bluefin 21’.

The unmanned submarine will return to Perth this weekend and will be replaced by a commercial deep water search vehicle.

An RAAF aircraft also detected a mystery signal earlier in the search, showing there were other signals being transmitted.

“It is clear there were other man made signals out there,” an expert said.

In answer to questions from News Corp Australia the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) said that the signals were “likely” sourced from electronic equipment and were “believed to be” consistent with the Flight Data Recorder.

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However the scientists said the 33.3 kilohertz frequency of the signal was very different to the 37.5 kilohertz generated by underwater acoustic beacons. The signals were also detected some 30km and four days apart.

The JACC has refused a request to release recordings of the signals for independent analysis and it did not release the exact location or precise depth of the signals.

Agency head retired defence chief Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston said the signals were still being analysed to ensure nothing was overlooked.

“They won’t release them because they don’t know what it is,” one scientist said.

“Signals do pass through water in complicated ways and you can get unusual ‘sound ducts’ but at those distances it is very unlikely.”

According to the scientists the required critical, detailed analysis of the signals was not conducted before Mr Abbott went public in China on April 11.

His announcement coincided with negative political fallout over his controversial “knights and dames” decision to change the Australian honours system and the ICAC scandal enveloping former NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell.

“We are confident that we know the position of the black box flight recorder to within some kilometres,” Mr Abbott said in Shanghai.

ACM Houston almost immediately contradicted him saying that nothing had changed.

“On the information I have available to me, there has been no major breakthrough in the search for MH370,” he said at the time.

Seventeen ships and 23 aircraft from eight countries were involved in the search and RAAF P-3C Orion aircraft deployed 1416 sonobuoys at a cost of $1018 each or $1.4 million.

The Malaysian Airlines flight, with 239 passengers and crew on board, disappeared in the early hours of March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Since then no trace of the jetliner has been found, despite a multi-million dollar search effort.

There are so far no clues, at least publicly known, for why and how the plane veered so radically from its course, doing an air turnback as it was crossing between Malaysian and Vietnamese air space, and then flying back over Malaysia, over the tip of Indonesia and into the treacherous southern Indian Ocean.

The search, off Perth, has so far yielded little.