Missing flight MH370: JACC chief Angus Houston says search could take more than two years

Updated

Retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, who is coordinating the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, says whilst it could take more than two years to find the plane, authorities are making progress.

Air Chief Marshal Houston says it is an even harder task than the search for an Air France jet that was eventually located just 6.5 nautical miles from its last known location.

"I think you've just got to be a little bit patient here, just hark back to Air France. The aircraft was found 6.5 nautical miles from its last known position and it took two years to find it," he told ABC News Breakfast.

"We're dealing with a much more challenging set of circumstances where the last known position was up at the entrance, northern entrance to the Malacca Straits north of the equator."

The Malaysian jet disappeared three months ago and analysts are trying to narrow down a huge area in the Indian Ocean to resume searching.

Authorities had previously claimed they were closing in on the plane's debris, however last month concluded pings picked up in the southern Indian Ocean did not come from the black box as suspected.

"I've tried to be realistic, I've been guarded in optimism. Certainly when we picked up those four acoustic transmissions I guess our hope went up and again, I was very guarded about that," Air Chief Marshal Houston said.

"I said we can't confirm that there's anything down there until such time as we find something on the bottom.

"I've always said that that 7th handshake arc is the most robust data that we have. The aircraft will be found along that arc."

Overall search costs to be shared with Malaysia

Air Chief Marshal Houston says there is a lot of number-crunching being done to narrow the search area along the arc in the Indian Ocean, and $60 million has been set aside for the search itself.

"The world team ... is working very closely with experts from Australia ... to determine the most likely area along the arc where we should search," he said.

"And some time in the near future we will publicly announce a search area of about 60,000 square kilometres which will be searched by deepwater technology, sideways looking sonar, towed sonar, autonomous underwater vehicles to try and find MH370.

"We're doing the survey of the ocean floor to ensure that when we start the deepwater search we will be searching ... in the right area and we'll have a really good idea of what the bottom of the ocean looks like in that particular area.

"It's never been surveyed in this way before."

Air Chief Marshal Houston says the search cost will be shared with Malaysia, but the details of the split have yet to be negotiated.

Five families of passengers aboard the missing flight are hoping to raise millions for information to help find the aircraft.

Air Chief Marshal Houston says any additional effort to find the plane is the families' prerogative.

"The families can do what they like but I just say that the Prime Minister and myself got a letter from the families thanking us for the way we've been conducting ourselves and conducting the search," he said.

"I got that over the weekend and I have a very good relationship with the families and if that's what they want to do that's up to them."

Topics: air-and-space, accidents, disasters-and-accidents, defence-forces, defence-and-national-security, foreign-affairs, government-and-politics, australia, malaysia

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