Canberra: The hunt for MH370 will end for good this summer if the Malaysia Airlines plane still isn't found, the chief investigator said on the eve of the second anniversary of its disappearance.
The search of a 46,000-square mile area of the southern Indian Ocean will most likely end in July, Australian Transport Safety Bureau Chief Commissioner Martin Dolan told NBC News Monday.
Three-quarters of the search zone has been completed so far. "If we don't find the aircraft within the priority search site … that's the point at which the search will stop," Dolan said.
He said the governments involved in the search — Malaysia, China and Australia — "don't have the appetite" to widen the search area, having already spent almost $100 million mapping and scanning the ocean floor.
But new discoveries of possible wreckage — one last week in Mozambique and another reported Sunday on Reunion Island — had raised optimism that they are looking in the right place, Dolan added.
In particular, the possible Boeing 777 part found in Mozambique by American lawyer Blaine Alan Gibson is of interest to the ATSB, Dolan said. Laboratory experiments would help them decide if the object a piece of wreckage, and what clues it could give them about the location of MH370, which vanished on March 8, 2014 with 239 passengers and crew on board.
07/03/16 Ed Flanagan and Alastair Jamieson/NBC News
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The search of a 46,000-square mile area of the southern Indian Ocean will most likely end in July, Australian Transport Safety Bureau Chief Commissioner Martin Dolan told NBC News Monday.
Three-quarters of the search zone has been completed so far. "If we don't find the aircraft within the priority search site … that's the point at which the search will stop," Dolan said.
He said the governments involved in the search — Malaysia, China and Australia — "don't have the appetite" to widen the search area, having already spent almost $100 million mapping and scanning the ocean floor.
But new discoveries of possible wreckage — one last week in Mozambique and another reported Sunday on Reunion Island — had raised optimism that they are looking in the right place, Dolan added.
In particular, the possible Boeing 777 part found in Mozambique by American lawyer Blaine Alan Gibson is of interest to the ATSB, Dolan said. Laboratory experiments would help them decide if the object a piece of wreckage, and what clues it could give them about the location of MH370, which vanished on March 8, 2014 with 239 passengers and crew on board.
07/03/16 Ed Flanagan and Alastair Jamieson/NBC News
