Missing flight MH370: Relatives refuse to give up hope after false trail ends in southern Indian Ocean

Updated

Relatives of an Australian couple on board doomed Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 say they are not giving up hope despite confirmation searchers followed a false trail as they hunted for the plane in the southern Indian Ocean.

The Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) searching for the missing plane says it has completed its search in the southern Indian Ocean where pings thought to come from the plane's black box had been detected.

Recovery experts have now concluded that the acoustic signals did not come from the plane and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau says the passenger jet is not in the designated search area.

MH370 went missing in March with 239 people on board en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Relatives of missing Queensland couple Bob and Cathy Lawton, who were among the six Australians on the plane, say they are disappointed the search is back to square one.

"The mystery has to be solved and we hope they don't give up," Mr Lawton's sister-in-law Rhonda Lawton said.

In a statement released yesterday, JACC said unmanned submarine Bluefin-21 had completed its last mission searching in the vicinity of the acoustic signals detected in April.

It said data from the missions had been analysed, leading the organisation to advise "that no signs of aircraft debris have been found" on the seafloor in the identified area.

Despite ruling out the current search area as the crash site, JACC said it remained confident the plane did fly over the Indian Ocean.

"We know that the aircraft entered the water in a long but narrow arc of the southern Indian Ocean," it said.

"The focus of the ATSB's (Australian Transport Safety Bureau) work now is to narrow the search area of this arc."

An 850-square-kilometre area of ocean floor has been searched since Bluefin-21 joined the search effort.

A US Navy pinger locator, dragged by the Australian ship Ocean Shield, was used by searchers to listen for underwater signals in an area where satellite data suggested the plane went down.

The data put MH370's last location about 1,600 kilometres off the coast of Western Australia.

In April the pinger locator detected several signals consistent with those emitted by an aircraft black box. The battery in the flight recorder box has since died.

At the time, Prime Minister Tony Abbott expressed confidence that searchers knew where the plane wreckage was, to within a few kilometres.

JACC says it is continuing to examine the signals but is yet to determine what and where they came from. It says it is possible the origin of the acoustic detections may never be known.

Federal Transport Minister Warren Truss says the search will continue along the arc but that it will move into a "different phase".

"We are still very confident that the resting place of the aircraft is in the Southern Ocean and along the seventh ping line," he said in a statement to Parliament yesterday.

"We concentrated the search in that area because the pings, the information we received, was the best information available at the time. And that's all you can do in circumstances like this; follow the very best leads."

Mr Truss said a Chinese ship had begun mapping the ocean floor in the search area ahead of the resumption of the underwater search in August.

"This is a painstaking effort in a very large ocean. The area to be searched under the ... next stage could be as big as 800km in length by 70km wide," he said.

The Minister said there would now be an "extensive" review of all the data associated with the plane's disappearance, which would also be peer reviewed.

Ocean Shield has now left the search area and is expected to arrive at the Fleet Base West on Saturday, JACC said.

Eight nations, including Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea, Britain and China, have been involved in the unprecedented hunt for the aircraft.

US Navy earlier dismissed officer's search zone claims

The announcement on Thursday came hours after the US Navy's deputy director of ocean engineering told CNN there was broad agreement the signals came from some other man-made source unrelated to the plane, which disappeared on March 8 carrying 239 people, including six Australians.

"Our best theory at this point is that [the pings were] likely some sound produced by the ship... or within the electronics of the towed pinger locator," the US Navy's deputy director of ocean engineering Michael Dean said.

"Your fear any time you put electronic equipment in the water is that if any water gets in and grounds or shorts something out, that you could start producing sound."

The US Navy issued a statement soon after calling Mr Dean's comments "speculative and premature".

"The US has been working cooperatively with our Malaysia, Australian and international partners for more than two months in an effort to locate MH370," a spokesman said.

"Mike Dean's comments today were speculative and premature, as we continue to work with our partners to more thoroughly understand the data acquired by the towed pinger locator.

"As such, we would defer to the Australians, as the lead in the search effort, to make additional information known at the appropriate time."

Malaysia's government and British satellite firm Inmarsat released data this week to help determine the path of MH370.

Families of the missing passengers are hoping that opening up the data to analysis by a wider range of experts could help verify the plane's last location.

Australian authorities said the data supported the theory that the plane crashed after running out of fuel.

ABC/Reuters

Topics: accidents, disasters-and-accidents, air-and-space, wa, qld, malaysia

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