Governments expected to end the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 next week face growing opposition from international experts worried the ministers involved are avoiding their responsibilities and putting the flying public at risk.

Malaysia, Australia and China have been the three key countries involved in the search since the plane went missing in 2014.

David Gallo, an oceanographic expert who co-led the teams that found Air France flight 447 and produced the first detailed maps of the wreck of the Titanic, yesterday warned the governments to look closely at the cost of not continuing the search.

“I have everyday people emailing, texting and tweeting asking can you please stand up and say we need to get this done,” he told The Weekend West from the US.

“I think people don’t realise what the impact is.

“One is to the families and the loved ones. But the second part is the flying public. Not knowing what happened to this aircraft means that we’re all at risk of having the same thing happen to us or to our loved ones.”

Camera Icon A piece of debris washes up on Saint-Andre de la Reunion, in the Indian Ocean. Credit: AFP

More than 10 million people board more than 95,000 flights a day. “When you look at that cost I think it becomes worth it to spend that kind of money and effort,” Mr Gallo said.

Australian Transport Minister Darren Chester, his Malaysian counterpart Liow Tiong Lai and China’s Yang Chuantang said last year that the search would end in the absence of credible new evidence leading to a specific location for the plane.

This is expected to happen — subject to weather — late next week when the Fugro Equator, the last ship still involved in the search, heads back to Fremantle. It is expected to return to Singapore.

Ending the search leaves unsolved the mystery of what happened to the Boeing 777, which disappeared in March 2014 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew aboard including six Australians and Perth resident Paul Weeks.

The Fugro Equator is using an autonomous underwater vehicle to run sonar scans in a new 25,000sqkm area identified by experts as the most likely site for aircraft debris.

Camera Icon Blaine Gibson on Riake beach, Madagascar.

Camera Icon Blaine Gibson on Riake beach, Madagascar.

They recommended that the search continue until examination of all the remaining possible crash sites was exhausted.

The families of MH370 victims and Australian investigators also want to extend the search but the ministers said the information was not precise enough to warrant the extra $50 million cost.

Mr Gallo, a former director of special operations at the US-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and one of the first scientists to use robots and submarines to map the deep ocean floor, questioned how the governments could decide the information provided by the experts was not precise enough.

The search for the Air France Airbus A330 in deep water is the one most often compared with the MH370 operation because the black boxes were not found until a second expedition funded by French air safety investigator BEA, Airbus and Air France was mounted in 2011.

The US expert said the disruption of ending the search and demobilising the Fugro Equator would break up an experienced team and meant it would cost more to restart the search, something he considered inevitable.

“You break the ribbon, you lose all the pieces and the cost goes way up in attempting to bring it all back together,” he said.

Debris hunter Blaine Gibson, who has found more than 10 pieces of MH370 wreckage, told The Weekend West yesterdaythat the Malaysians just wanted to move on. “I think the Malaysians right now just want to forget about it,” Mr Gibson said.

“They just want to put it behind.”