|
 The search effort for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which
vanished while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8 with
239 people on board, has so far failed to turn up any trace of
wreckage from the plane.
Given the amount of time that has elapsed, Abbott said that efforts
would now shift away from the visual searches conducted by planes
and ships and towards underwater equipment capable of scouring the
ocean floor with sophisticated sensors.
He admitted, however, that it was possible nothing would ever be
found of the jetliner.
"We will do everything we humanly can, everything we reasonably can,
to solve this mystery," he told reporters in Canberra.
Malaysia, China, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Britain and the
United States are assisting Australia in conducting the most
expensive search in aviation history.
It remains unclear what caused the Boeing 777 to veer sharply off
its course and disappear from radar as it prepared to cross into
Vietnamese airspace.
Malaysian authorities have still not ruled out mechanical problems,
but say evidence suggests it was deliberately diverted from its
scheduled route.
Malaysia is under pressure to bring closure to the grieving families
by finding wreckage to determine definitively what happened to the
aircraft.
But the empty expanse of water northwest of the Australian city of
Perth is one of the most remote places in the world and also one of
the deepest, making the search complicated.
Authorities had been focusing on a 10 square km (6.2 square mile)
stretch of seabed about 2,000 miles from Perth, after detecting what
they suspected was a signal from the plane's black box recorder on
April 4.
[to top of second column] |
The U.S. Navy Bluefin-21 underwater drone searching the seabed has
so far failed to turn up any sign of the plane.
"We are still baffled and disappointed that we haven't been able to
find undersea wreckage based on those detections," Abbott told
reporters.
Abbott said that the new search area, which spans 700 km by 80 km
(435 miles by 40 miles), could take between 6-8 months to completely
examine, at a cost to Australia of as much as A$60 million ($55.69
million).
The search operations have up until now been handled primarily as a
military operation by the countries involved, but Abbott said that
one or more commercial companies would be hired by Australia and
Malaysia to handle the next phase.
Angus Houston, head of the Australian agency coordinating the search
effort, offered a sobering assessment of the operation.
"We haven't found anything anywhere that has any connection to
MH370," Houston said during the Abbott news conference. ($1 = 1.0774
Australian eollars)
(Reporting by Matt Siegel; editing by Simon Cameron-Moore and
Michael Perry)
[© 2014 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2014 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
