Sydney: Top searchers at the Dutch company leading the underwater hunt for Malaysia Airlines jet MH370 say they believe the plane may have glided down rather than dived in the final moments, meaning they have been scouring the wrong patch of ocean for two years.
Flight MH370 disappeared in March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew onboard en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. Searchers led by engineering group Fugro have been combing an area roughly the size of Greece for two years.
That search, over 120,000 square kilometres of the southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia, is expected to end in three months and could be called off after that following a meeting of key countries Malaysia, China and Australia on Friday.
The three countries agreed in April 2015 that should the aircraft not be located within the search area, and in the absence of any new credible evidence, the search area would not be extended. So far, nothing has been found.
"If it's not there, it means it's somewhere else," Fugro project director Paul Kennedy told Reuters.
Kennedy does not exclude extreme possibilities that could have made the plane impossible to spot in the search zone, and still hopes to find the craft. But he and his team argue another option is the plane glided down - meaning it was manned at the end - and made it beyond the area marked out by calculations from satellite images.
"If it was manned it could glide for a long way," Kennedy said. "You could glide it for further than our search area is, so I believe the logical conclusion will be well maybe that is the other scenario."
Doubts that the search teams are looking in the right place will likely fuel calls for all data to be made publicly available so that academics and rival companies can pursue an "open source" solution - a collaborative public answer to the airline industry's greatest mystery.
Fugro's controlled glide hypothesis is also the first time officials have leant some support to contested theories that someone was in control during the flight's final moments.
21/07/16 Jonatahn Barret and Swati Pandey/Reuters
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Flight MH370 disappeared in March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew onboard en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. Searchers led by engineering group Fugro have been combing an area roughly the size of Greece for two years.
That search, over 120,000 square kilometres of the southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia, is expected to end in three months and could be called off after that following a meeting of key countries Malaysia, China and Australia on Friday.
The three countries agreed in April 2015 that should the aircraft not be located within the search area, and in the absence of any new credible evidence, the search area would not be extended. So far, nothing has been found.
"If it's not there, it means it's somewhere else," Fugro project director Paul Kennedy told Reuters.
Kennedy does not exclude extreme possibilities that could have made the plane impossible to spot in the search zone, and still hopes to find the craft. But he and his team argue another option is the plane glided down - meaning it was manned at the end - and made it beyond the area marked out by calculations from satellite images.
"If it was manned it could glide for a long way," Kennedy said. "You could glide it for further than our search area is, so I believe the logical conclusion will be well maybe that is the other scenario."
Doubts that the search teams are looking in the right place will likely fuel calls for all data to be made publicly available so that academics and rival companies can pursue an "open source" solution - a collaborative public answer to the airline industry's greatest mystery.
Fugro's controlled glide hypothesis is also the first time officials have leant some support to contested theories that someone was in control during the flight's final moments.
21/07/16 Jonatahn Barret and Swati Pandey/Reuters
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