Family members of those aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 today alleged that they were closeted away by airline officials who prevented them from meeting the transport ministers of Malaysia, China, and Australia.
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The search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 will be suspended rather than shut down if the plane is not found in the current search area, officials say.
Flight MH370 disappeared in March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew onboard.
About 20 percent of the designated search area, or about 3,800 square miles, remains unexplored.
At a news conference with his Chinese and Australian counterparts, Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said the suspension had been agreed “in the absence of new credible evidence”.
A Western Australia University oceanographer Charitha Pattiaratchi, who has done extensive drift modeling, said the plane could have crashed slightly north of the current search area.
Investigators have not been successful in finding out the reason for the plane’s disappearance due to lack of information and the failure to find the plane’s black boxes and the main body. “I can promise them that we will not give up”.
Their search was expected to finish by the end of August, but their work has been hampered by poor weather for several weeks.
“Whether to resume the search and whether to continue, that would depend on the new credible evidence that we obtain”, he said.
Fugro project director Paul Kennedy told Reuters that he 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.
Liow said four pieces of debris tested by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) had nearly certainly shown they originated from the MH370 while eight more pieces of debris were yet to be examined.
The Australia-led search has focused on 120,000 square kilometers of the southern Indian Ocean down to rugged depths exceeding 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) at a cost of A$180 million (163 million euros).
There is now less than 10,000sq km of the 120,000sq km search zone left to be examined.
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Pattiaratchi’s modelling was based on how long the first piece of confirmed Flight 370 wreckage took to reach La Reunion, and his team’s calculations of the effects of currents, wind and waves on drifting debris put the crash site just north of the current search area. This decision [on search area] was based on what we know on the last communication with the aircraft.
