MH370: Search area for Malaysia Airlines plane to double, authorities confirm

The authorities searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have pledged to double the search area if the plane is not found in the next few weeks.

At a joint meeting of government ministers from Australia, China and Malaysia, officials confirmed that the next phase of the search will cover an additional 60,000 sq km (23,000 sq miles) if efforts in the current search area of the same size prove fruitless.

Four vessels, each equipped with a sophisticated underwater drone to scan the sea floor for debris, have covered more than 60 per cent of the area designated as highest priority.

That search, which has already cost more than £60 million, is due to be completed in May.

Officials have failed to find a single item of wreckage from MH370, which disappeared on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March last year with 239 people on board. The majority of the passengers were Chinese.

At the meeting in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday, officials said the extended search could take up to a year, and that it would cost further AUS$50 million (£26 million).

In a joint statement, the Malaysian Transport Minister, Liow Tiong Lai, the Australian Deputy Prime Minister, Warren Truss, and the Chinese Transport Minister, Yang Chuantang, pledged to bring “peace to the families” of those presumed dead in the incident.

“Should the aircraft not be found within the current search area, ministers agreed to extend the search by an additional 60,000 square kilometres to bring the search area to 120,000 square kilometres and thereby cover the entire highest probability area identified by expert analysis,” they said.

The total search area including the extension “would cover 95 per cent of the flight path", Liow told reporters.

MH370 vanished from radar screens shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, and satellite data have led investigators to believe it was flown thousands of miles off course before eventually crashing in the southern Indian Ocean.

No mention was made at the press conference of what happens if the extended search also fails to find the plane, but in March the Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott pre-empted today’s decision and said the operation “can’t go on forever”.

“We've got 60,000 square km [of ocean] that is the subject of this search,” he told reporters. “If that's unsuccessful, there's another 60,000 square km that we intend to search and, as I said, we are reasonably confident of finding the plane.”

Loss-making Malaysia Airlines, whose fortunes worsened when another of its Boeing 777's was shot down over Ukraine on July 17, killing all 298 people on board, was delisted at the end of 2014 as part of a huge government-led restructuring programme.