MH370 search is on right track: Australian transport chief

The head of Australia’s transport safety bureau has defended the fruitless hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, saying he is confident that search teams are targeting the right area.

Satellite analysis in the days after the Boeing 777 went missing on March 8 with 239 people onboard placed the jet somewhere in a huge tract of the Indian Ocean stretching from near Indonesia south towards Antarctica.

But in a setback, the area believed to be the jet’s most likely resting place based on the detection of acoustic ‘pings’ was Thursday ruled out after an extensive underwater search.

Australia’s Transport Safety Bureau chief commissioner Martin Dolan told AFP the source of the acoustic transmissions, thought to be man-made, was still a mystery.

‘To be frank, we don’t know. We like to be the experts but sometimes we just don’t know the answer,’ he said, refusing to speculate on whether they came from the Australian vessel hunting for signals from the aircraft’s black boxes.

Dolan, whose organisation is playing a key role in the search effort, said the four signals detected in April were then the best lead in the hunt for the plane, which mysteriously diverted from its Kuala Lumpur to Beijing route.

‘This was the best area to look at the time. We still don’t have anything that confirms that it’s the wrong place. But we will do our analysis and we will determine the best search area for the next phase.’

Dolan said while experts were reassessing the satellite data that led the search to the southern Indian Ocean, the linear arc produced by analysis of this information still likely represented the plane’s flight path.

‘That arc is definite. We know that somewhere close to that very long arc is where the aircraft will be found,’ he said in an interview late Thursday.

The arc was produced by analysing satellite signalling messages, also referred to as ‘handshakes’, between the ground station, the satellite and the aircraft’s satellite communication system.