He said suspension of the search does not mean an end to it.
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The search for missing Flight MH370 will be suspended if the aircraft is not found in the current search area, the authorities announced in a statement yesterday.
Recovery operations in the southern Indian Ocean will be suspended after ships finish scouring the 120,000 square-kilometer (46,330 square miles) zone. The likelihood of finding the airliner is “fading” but the search will not be terminated, the JACC said in a statement attributed to senior ministers from Australia, Malaysia and China.
It disappeared at 12.41am on March 8, 2014 and has become world aviation’s biggest unsolved mystery. The deleted records showed that the captain’s simulated flight departed from Kuala Lumpur, veered over the Southern Indian Ocean, and then kept going to the point where fuel would be exhausted over an empty stretch of sea.
“We expect that to complete the 120,000 sq.km, the search may have to be extended to October through December 2016”. “While acknowledging the significance of the debris, Ministers noted that to date, none of it had provided information that positively identified the precise location of the aircraft”. “What kind of information will they need to continue the search?”
According to Fugro project director Paul Kennedy, there is an existing possibility that the MH370 plane was guided in its last moments by an experienced pilot, shifting its course away from the estimated crash zone that was calculated by satellite images.
Western Australia University oceanographer Charitha Pattiaratchi, who has done extensive drift modeling, has said the plane could have crashed slightly north of the current search area.
The use of the term “suspended” at the conference was an apparent nod to anguished families who have stepped up demands recently for authorities not to fully abandon efforts to locate the aircraft.
‘We will continue to analyse the data that we’ve collected.at the same time looking for new credible evidence, ‘ he said. “I read into it a commitment to stay engaged in the search and to hold themselves accountable to pursue the truth”.
Nearly 180m Australian dollars ($135m, £101m) has been spent on the search so far, making it the most expensive in aviation history.
Several pieces of debris have been recovered – one off the coast of Reunion Island, which sits east of Madagascar, and other pieces in Mauritius, South Africa and Mozambique.
The latest announcement came a day after a search team admitted they believe they have been searching the wrong area.
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“I will never agree with the decision to suspend the search”, Zhang Qian, whose wife was on the plane, told AP.
