The search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 will be extended till 2017. Meanwhile, a ship involved with the search has been fitted with a drone to examine several sonar contacts on the remote seabed west of Australia.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is leading the search for the Boeing 777, reported that none of the sonar contacts is characteristic of a typical aircraft debris field. However, some of them exhibit man-made properties and needs to be investigated.
More than 20 sonar contacts has been picked up by crews in recent months however, there are more investigation required. They are between 2,700km and 1,900km from the Australian port of Fremantle where the search ships are based.
Crews have picked up hundreds of sonar contacts of interest during the two-year hunt for MH370, which vanished on 8 March 2014, during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.
None of the recent sonar contacts the drone will investigate is classification 1. Only two have fitted into that category during the search – one was an old ship wreck and the other was a rock field.
The underwater search of about 120,000 sq km in the southern Indian Ocean seabed, which is believed to cover the most likely area for a crash site, is almost complete. Unfortunately, there is no trace of the plane being found.
