Search Area for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Should Be Expanded, Report Says
Investigators combing the southern Indian Ocean floor for the Malaysian jet that vanished in 2014 with 239 people aboard recommended on Tuesday that the search area be expanded. But a senior Australian official ruled that out, saying the search would end soon unless new, specific information about the location of the wreckage emerged.
A team led by Australia has been searching about 46,000 square miles of seafloor for debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared on March 8, 2014. The plane, a Boeing 777, took off from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, bound for Beijing but instead flew south for unknown reasons. It is believed to have crashed in the Indian Ocean far away from Australia’s southwestern coast.
The search of the ocean floor, which is expected to be finished early next year, has been fruitless, though some pieces of debris that drifted to remote islands have been confirmed to have come from the plane.
On Tuesday, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is leading the search, recommended that about 9,700 square miles be added to the search zone, citing a new analysis. But the infrastructure and transport minister, Darren Chester, said Australia, China and Malaysia had agreed in July that the search area would not be expanded unless “credible evidence is available that identifies the specific location of the aircraft.”
The new recommendation does not meet that standard, Mr. Chester said. He said the investigators “remain hopeful that we will locate the aircraft” in the area currently being searched.
The agency recommended searching along the northern third of an arc that experts had previously mapped out as the jet’s likely trajectory, based in part on the plane’s electronic communications with a satellite. “We believe that the aircraft is on the seafloor within that area,” David Griffin, a scientist at Csiro’s oceans and atmosphere division, said by telephone. “Very close to the arc is the most likely place, but also very likely is an area 25 nautical miles to the west of the arc.”
That area was partly searched in late 2014 and early 2015.
Australia is leading the search for the plane and is shouldering most of its costs, though China and Malaysia are also involved in the decisions. Most of the passengers on the plane were Chinese.
The search zone was expanded once before, in April 2015, when it was doubled to the current 46,000 square miles. About 90 percent of that area has been searched. A spokesman for the Transport Safety Bureau, Dan O’Malley, said on Tuesday that the authorities were confident that if the plane was in the area already searched, it would have been found.
source:nytimes.com
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