Australia, China and Malaysia today held trilateral talks to map out the next steps in the arduous search for the crashed Malaysian jet with officials saying it may take up to two months before new and more sophisticated sonar equipment is deployed in the hunt.
Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss and head of the search operation Angus Houston met Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein and Chinese Transport Minister Yang Chuantang here to chart out the future course of action in the underwater search, which will focus on a 60,000 square kilometre patch of Indian Ocean seabed.
Truss admitted the hunt for the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 that has been on for almost two months will take time with the seabed in the prospective search zone several kilometres deep and largely unmapped.
He said a tender process has begun to acquire new and more advanced equipment to scour the seabed.
Truss said there were only a "handful" of such assets around the world, most of which are in the private sector.
"I should emphasise that there are only a handful of relevant pieces of machinery in the world...But we know that some countries have oceanographic vessels that are capable of mapping the sea at that depth, and hopefully we will be able to harness some of that equipment to get on with that job," he said.
"We are optimistic that we can do most of this in the space of one to two months so we will actually have more hardware in the water within a couple of months," Truss said.
"In the interim we'll still have the Bluefin-21 working and we'll get going on the oceanographic work that needs to be done so they'll be no long interruptions in this search," he added.
The top experts from the three nations would again meet on Wednesday to analyse information and data collected.
Houston said it was "sensible" to take stock of the situation and analyse the data gathered after scouring more than 4.6 million square kilometres of the ocean to make sure the deductions and conclusions in the search are right.
"We've got to this stage of the process where it's very sensible to go back and have a look at all of the data that has been gathered, all of the analysis that has been done and make sure there's no flaws in it, the assumptions are right, the analysis is right and the deductions and conclusions are right," Houston said.
The Beijing-bound Boeing 777-200 plane - carrying 239 people, including five Indians, an Indo-Canadian and 154 Chinese nationals - had mysteriously vanished on March 8 after taking off from Kuala Lumpur.
