The families of the 227 passengers on board missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 rushed to file lawsuits in several countries against the airline Monday ahead of a two-year deadline under an worldwide treaty.
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“If we don’t find the aircraft within the priority search site… that’s the point at which the search will stop”, he said, suggesting the plane will be found in the last, unsearched quadrant of the search area.
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Even if the piece does not turn out to be from the jet that disappeared on March 8, 2014, Gibson said his discovery could still be useful, perhaps providing clues to another air disaster or raising the public’s awareness that the mystery of Flight 370 still has not been solved.
Many families accuse the airline and Malaysian government of letting the plane slip away through a bungled response, withholding information on what happened, and treating grieving relatives insensitively, charges that are denied.
“Our best estimate back then was it would take up to two years”, says Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is heading up the hunt in the desolate waters of the Indian Ocean 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) off Australia’s west coast.
He said the part would be sent to Australia for inspection, but that it would remain under Malaysia’s custody.
He said pulling a piece of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane from the depths of the southern Indian Ocean would be a moment of “bittersweet relief”.
The plaintiffs’ counsel N. Ganesan said American attorneys from the Podhurst Orseck firm based in Miami, Florida who have represented the plaintiffs in this matter from inception, will join them to conduct the case.
The latest discovery of an object at Reunion Island today could only be confirmed after the Malaysian team of experts and MH370 investigation team verify the found object, said Deputy Transport Minister Datuk Seri Abdul Aziz Kaprawi.
As ships surveyed tens of thousands of square miles of the bottom of the ocean where the plane is believed to have gone down, Australian searchers reported extinct volcanoes, enormous ridges and cavernous trenches discovered on the seabed by experts mapping the underwater terrain with state-of-the-art equipment.
A search co-cordinated by Australia, Malaysia and China in the southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia has so far scoured 120,000 sq km of the sea floor at an estimated cost of about $180 million. If the Flight 370 plane is ever found, the wreckage will immediately present a host of new questions before its likely to provide answers about the planes disappearance nearly two years ago. “We will be able to have a clear indication of what it is after we have finished with our laboratory work”, Abreu said.
Families of those on board the plane are calling for the search operation to be extended past June.
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The head of Mozambique’s Civil Aviation Institute, Comandante Joao Abreu, shows a piece of debris found on a beach that could be from missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, in Maputo, March 3, 2016.
