The Boeing 777 disappeared while traveling from Kuala Lumpur to China with 239 people on board. “Ministers reiterated that the aspiration to locate MH370 has not been abandoned”, said the statement read out by meeting host Liow Tiong Lai of Malaysia as Australia’s Darren Chester and China’s Yang Chuantang looked on.
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The MH370 underwater search area in the southern Indian Ocean.
The search, originally scheduled to end in June, has been hampered due to bad weather.
“I don’t think I can accept they want to stop searching”.
Relatives of passengers missing on Malaysia Airlines MH370 hold placards after a joint press conference on the search for the missing airliner Friday.
The appeal by an global group of MH370 next-of-kin, Voice 370, called on “Malaysia, Australia and China not to abandon the search” if the current zone being trawled for the wreckage is found to be empty, a statement by the group said.
Some debris from the wreck has shown up in Mozambique, Maldives, and possibly Madagascar, but no one has found the plane’s main body, or its passengers.
Although the ministers were at pains to say they were not permanently ending the search, it is evident that it is highly unlikely to continue after that, given how few clues have emerged since the disappearance of the plane.
Representatives from Malaysia, Australia, and China made the decision while meeting Friday. With only 10,000 square kilometres (of the originally assigned 120,000) left to be scoured, the authorities have admitted the hope of finding the wreckage is rapidly diminishing.
Some families remained hopeful and called for the three countries to actively seek new angles to resolve the mystery, while some reacted with anger.
The countries had previously agreed to end the search in the southern Indian Ocean if no “credible new information” was detected.
The minister insisted searchers believed they were looking in the right area – despite a report on Thursday citing a search project manager saying the plane may have glided down rather than dived, so could have travelled further than thought.
The minister also said all data and information collected from the search would be released to the public.
Loved ones of those who went missing after the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 – which disappeared in 2014 after taking off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport – were in for a fresh round of gloom.
The first debris from MH370 was found on Reunion Island in July 2015.
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Kennedy’s theory raises the possibility that someone may have been in control of the plane in the final moments.
