The statement emphasizes that the hunt will be suspended once the current search area is covered, although the suspension does not mean the search is terminated and that hope of finding MH370 is abandoned.
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The search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 will be suspended upon the completion of the 120,000sq km targeted search area, the MH370 Ministerial Tripartite meeting concluded today.
In their communique, Malaysian Minister of Transport, Dato’ Sri Liow Tiong Lai, Australian Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, Darren Chester and the Chinese Minister of Transport, Yang Chuantang, said they had discussed the disruption to the search.
“We had anticipated that a decision would be made to suspend the search”.
Close to $135 million has been spent since on a massive underwater search, spanning 120,000 square kilometres in the southern Indian Ocean, since the plane disappeared in March 2014 with 239 people onboard en route from Malaysia to China. The multi-million dollar effort consisted of several ships with special equipment scanning sections of the sea floor.
Liow said the hunt in the remaining area has been delayed due to bad weather.
Liow also dismissed a news report suggesting that the search team might had all this while looking in the wrong area.
“I will never agree with the decision to suspend the search”.
“Cost is not a factor in considering the suspension”, he said when asked if cost was the factor.
But Jeanette Maguire, whose sister and brother-in-law Cathy and Bob Lawton, from Brisbane, Australia, were aboard Flight 370, said that while the decision is “very hard to accept”, she understood searchers needed more information to continue, “because it’s costing an absolute fortune”.
Zhang Meiling, whose daughter and son-in-law were on board MH370, told CNN that she thought the officials were just making excuses for a job poorly done.
“I must emphasise that this does not mean we have given up of locating MH370”, he said in a press conference at Putra Perdana, attended by both domestic and worldwide media. Whoever is holding them now, please free them. We knew they would do this. All those on board are presumed dead.
Nathan wondered if the families would have to finance measures on their own.
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. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) and Malaysia investigators were examining the piece, believed to be an outboard wing flap. Those finds have confirmed the plane went down but have so far shed no light on the cause of the crash. “The debris can not tell us where the plane is”.
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Journalist KL Chan reported from Kuala Lumpur.
