Malaysia Flight 370: After Months of Telling Families Their Loves Ones Are Dead, Investigators Admit Search Area Is Wrong
After months of telling families of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 passengers that their loved ones are most likely dead, lead investigators have admitted that the plane is probably not in the main 528-mile search area in the Indian Ocean they had heavily focused on.
"The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has advised that the search in the vicinity of the acoustic detections can now be considered complete and in its professional judgment, the area can now be discounted as the final resting place of MH370," the Australia-based Joint Agency Coordination Centre said, according to CNN.
In March, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that the missing airplane, which disappeared on March 8 on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, carrying 239 people on board, had crashed in a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean, and insisted that there is no reason to believe anyone could have survived the crash.
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"It was released out of a commitment to openness and respect for the relatives, two principles which have guided the investigation," Razak said at the time, revealing that the analysis is based on satellite data by a British satellite company.
Relatives of passengers disputed the announcement, however, and said that there is not enough evidence to show that the plane did crash there and that their relatives are dead.
"I'm so mad," one unidentified family member said, insisting that there is no evidence that Flight 370 crashed in the Indian Ocean. "If you find something: OK, we accept," he added. "But nothing -- just from the data, just from analysis."
Several acoustic pings originally thought to be from the black boxes of the missing plane were also detected in early April, leading to an undersea search for the plane, which yielded no results.
Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss insisted, however, that the country is still confident that Flight 370 crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean.
"We are still very confident that the resting place of the aircraft is in the southern ocean and along the seventh ping line," Truss told parliament on Thursday.
"We concentrated the search in this area because the pings and the information we received was the best information we had available at the time. And that is all you can do in circumstances like this ... follow the very best leads."
Members of the International Investigation Team admitted in April, however, that the plane might not have crashed there after all.
"The thought of it landing somewhere else is not impossible, as we have not found a single debris that could be linked to MH370. However, the possibility of a specific country hiding the plane when more than 20 nations are searching for it, seems absurd," sources told Malaysian publication New Strait Times.
While the search for the missing plane has yielded several speculative theories, a CNN/ORC International poll found that slightly more than half of all Americans, or 52 percent, believe that the general public will one day know what actually happened to Flight 370. Forty-six percent believe it will forever remain a mystery.
