The vanished Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is highly unlikely to be in the current search zone and may instead be in a region farther north, according to the latest analysis by a team of international investigators today.
For two years, a handful of ships have diligently combed a remote patch of the Indian Ocean west of Australia in a USD 160 million bid to find the Boeing 777.
Today, investigators made what was surely a painful admission: They have probably been looking in the wrong place.
Though crews are expected to finish their deep-sea sonar hunt of the current search area next month, the possibility of extending the search to the north appeared doubtful, with Australia's transport minister suggesting the analysis wasn't specific enough to justify continuing the hunt.
The latest twist in the search for Flight 370 highlights the extraordinary difficulty officials have faced in their attempts to find the aircraft based on the faintest scraps of data. All along, officials have said they are not simply looking for a needle in a haystack - they are looking for the haystack.
Today, the haystack was poised to shift again, with the release of a report by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is leading the search for the plane. The report is the result of a November meeting of international and Australian experts who re-examined all the data used to define the search area for the aircraft, which vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board.
Since the plane disappeared, experts have analysed a series of exchanges between the aircraft and a satellite to estimate a probable crash site along a vast arc of ocean in the southern hemisphere.
A deep-sea search of a 120,000-square kilometre stretch of water along the arc has so far come up empty.
In November, the experts went back over the satellite data, along with the results of a new ocean drift analysis of the more than 20 items of debris likely to have come from the plane that have washed ashore on beaches throughout the Indian Ocean. The analysis, based on where the items washed up and when, suggested the debris originated farther north along the arc from the current search zone.
Given the number of aircraft parts found so far, the team concluded that a debris field had floated on the water surface after the plane crashed. So they eliminated areas of the ocean where air crews had searched the surface in the early stages of the hunt.
That left a 25,000-square-kilometre area immediately to the north of the current search zone as the most likely place where the plane hit the ocean, the report said.
The investigators concluded with "a high degree of confidence" that the plane is not in the current search area. And they agreed the new area needs to be searched.
It said: "The experts concluded that, if this area were to be searched, prospective areas for locating the aircraft wreckage, based on all the analysis to date, would be exhausted," the report said.
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