Top searchers at the
Dutch company leading the underwater hunt for Malaysia Airlines jet MH370 said that they believe the plane may have glided down rather than dived in the final moments.
Fugro engineering group, the lead searchers said yesterday in Sydney that it is an indication that they have been scouring the wrong patch of ocean for two years.
Flight MH370 disappeared in March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew onboard en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.
It said that the search of over 120,000 square kilometres of the southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia is expected to end in three months.
The group said that the search could be called off before then following a meeting of key countries Malaysia, China and Australia today.
Paul Kennedy, Fugro Project Director, said that the three countries agreed in April 2015 that should the aircraft not be located within the search area, and in the absence of any new credible evidence, the search area would not be extended.
“So far, nothing has been found, if it’s not there, it means it’s somewhere else.
Kennedy does not exclude extreme possibilities that could have made the plane impossible to spot in the search zone, and still hopes to find the craft.
He and his team argue another option is the plane glided down, meaning it was manned at the end and made it beyond the area marked out by calculations from satellite images.
“If it was manned it could glide for a long way.
“You could glide it for further than our search area is, so I believe the logical conclusion will be well maybe that is the other scenario.”
Experts said that “Doubts that the search teams are looking in the right place will likely fuel calls for all data to be made publicly available.
They said this would give the academics and rival companies the opportunity to pursue an “open source” solution, a collaborative public answer to the airline industry’s greatest mystery.