GOVERNMENT ministers from Australia, China and Malaysia on Thursday (April 16) said they would double the search area for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 if wreckage is not found in the current target area.
No trace has been found of the Boeing 777 aircraft, which disappeared in March last year carrying 239 passengers and crew in what has become one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history. Most of the passengers were Chinese.
The extended search for the jetliner, which is believed to have crashed in the Indian Ocean offAustralia’s west coast, could take up to a year, officials said at a meeting in Kuala Lumpur.
Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai, Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss and Chinese Transport Minister Yang Chuantang pledged to double the current search area if necessary.
“If we cannot locate the aircraft within the 60,000 square kilometres, we’ll continue the second phase of another 60,000 square kilometre search,” Liow Tiong Lai said during a joint news conference in Kuala Lumpur.
“So there is no change in the search zone, we are just moving, like Minister Liow said, to widen out the search area and to extend it in every direction,” Deputy Prime Minister Warren Trussadded.
“We expect the search will take at least the rest of this year, to complete the second 60,000 square kilometres,” Truss said.
The second phase of the search would cost an estimated A$50 million ($38.74 million) which would be borne by Malaysia and Australia, Liow added.
MH370 vanished from radar screens shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, bound for Beijing. Investigators believe it was flown thousands of miles off course before eventually crashing.
The search of a rugged 60,000 sq km (23,000 sq mile) patch of sea floor some 1,600 km (1,000 miles) west of the Australian city of Perth, which experts believe is the plane’s most likely resting place, will likely be finished by the end of May.
Four vessels equipped with sophisticated underwater drones, have searched more than 60 percent of the previously unmapped expanse of sea floor that has been designated the highest priority.
Loss-making Malaysia Airlines, whose fortunes worsened when another of its Boeing 777’s was shot down over Ukraine on July 17, killing all 298 people on board, was delisted at the end of 2014 as part of a $1.8 billion government-led restructuring. (Reuters)
