With rough winter seas delaying the last leg of the search, Mr Liow said completion was expected between October and December.
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“The end-of-flight scenarios are absolutely endless”, Fugro managing director Steve Duffield said.
CHALLENGES: The search zone is so remote that the sonar ships spend half their monthlong shifts transiting to and from their Australian port. The ocean ranges from 600 meters (2,000 feet) to 6.5 kilometers (4 miles) deep, with the average depth being 4 kilometers (2.5 miles).
The oceanographer whose calculations helped an American adventurer find potential debris from Flight 370 said Thursday that the Malaysia Airlines jetliner could have crashed slightly north of the current search area.
A skilled pilot in the cockpit, however, might have been able to glide the aircraft more than 100km, though this theory raises hard questions, notably why a pilot seemingly intent on saving the aircraft would have allowed it to reach such a position in the first place.
Ongoing poor weather conditions have severely impacted search operations and resulted in delays to search operations of around six to eight weeks.
Earlier this year, Gibson found a piece of plane wreckage off the Mozambique coast. Malaysia and Australia have worked with Tanzanian officials to assume responsibility for the item, believed to be an outboard wing flap.
Nearly €122 million has been spent since on an underwater search spanning 120,000 square kilometres in the southern Indian Ocean.
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”.
The Beijing-bound flight with 239 souls on board, captained by Zaharie Shah, went missing an hour into its departure from Kuala Lumpur.
“With less than 10,000 sq km of the high priority area remaining to be searched, the ministers acknowledge that despite best efforts of all involved, the likelihood of finding the aircraft is fading”.
“I’m sure that there is more sitting on beaches now that has not been recognised and not picked up”.
An Australian Transport Safety Bureau spokesman said all data collected during the search would be publicly released once the unprecedented operation was completed but would take some time to be collated.
He said: “This country and its leadership have wealthy friends”.
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It has been agreed that if the plane is not found in the current search area, and without any new information about its possible location, the hunt for the plane “would not end, but be suspended”. “I feel encouraged. Fearing the worst, we now have something to hang on to”, said K.S. Narenderan whose lost his wife Chandrika Sharma on the flight.
