Ocean currents, it’s said, would result in the debris ending up on the shores of southeast Africa.
“This is going to keep happening. It seems inevitable there are many more parts on beaches, yet to be found,” says BBC transport correspondent Richard Westcott. “Or maybe they have already been found, the people just don’t realize what they are yet.”
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau Chief Martin Dolan has been quoted as telling the Australian that “at this point there’s a diminishing level of confidence that we will find the aircraft”.
He admitted there will be a lot of disappointment “if we don’t find it”.
Dolan stressed that his team had the technical ability to continue the hunt but the resources to do so are a matter for the governments concerned i.e. Malaysia, China and Australia. “We have some way to go and our best bet is that we will complete the search late July, early August, depending on unforeseen circumstances”.
The search team is scouring the last 15,000 sq km patch of 120,000 sq km in the seventh arc in the southern Indian Ocean, off southeast Australia.
The Joint Agency Coordination Centre, in a statement said that searching for MH370 is a complicated task. The search area is a long way off from land, the water is very deep and the seafloor is largely uncharted. Some locations lie as deep as four miles below the surface.
Daylight can only penetrate in some areas, said the Agency. “On the deep sea floor, there’s no sunlight, which has made progress in the search slow.”
It’s still unclear, according to investigators, why the ill-fated plane deviated from its routine flight path and where it went next. All that’s known is that satellite communications continued between the missing aircraft and UK-based Inmarsat’s satellite communications network until 8.19 am on 8 March 2014 as the plane flew south over the Indian Ocean. Investigators have so far failed to detect what actually happened aboard MH370 before it deviated from the flight plan.
The plane stopped short of Vietnam, on a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, before turning back, flew over the peninsula and was seen over Pulau Perak in the Straits of Malacca before reportedly looping itself around the northern tip of Sumatra. Thereafter the plane’s exact location remains a mystery.
There were 239 passengers and crew on board. Most of the passengers were Chinese. There were six Australian citizens and permanent residents on board the plane.