Malaysia Airlines Mystery May Never Be Solved, Officials Say
Published at
ABC News(KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia) — Additional technology is being employed to search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, but officials admitted on Wednesday that the mystery into the jetliner’s disappearance may never be solved.
“Investigations may go on and on and on. We have to clear every little thing,” Malaysia’s Inspector General Khalid Abu Bakar told reporters in Kuala Lumpur. “At the end of the investigations, we may not even know the real cause. We may not even know the reason for this incident.”
Malaysian officials spent hours meeting with the Chinese relatives of passengers on the doomed plane in Kuala Lumpur Wednesday, a meeting that one Malaysian official described as cordial. Prime Minister Najib Razak also planned to travel to Pearce Air Force Base to meet with the team running search operations off of Australia’s coast.
Flight 370 and its 239 passengers vanished on March 8 — 25 days ago — but the search continues to yield few answers. Search efforts for the Boeing 777 started over the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea, then shifted west, north and south before settling on the southern Indian Ocean.
No trace of the plane has been recovered. The current search area is an 85,000-square-mile patch of ocean about 1,000 miles off of Australia’s coast.
The search now includes a submarine, the British vessel HMS Tireless. Batteries on the plane’s black box pingers will start to fade in a handful of days, and the sub will have to be within a mile or so to hear them — a daunting possibility in a search area that’s roughly the size of Ireland.
“The luck with using submarines is that you’ve got to be in the right place,” said ABC News aviation analyst John Nance. “The water is only going to conduct it for a certain distance. We’re going to have to have a lot of luck to be in the right place.”
When the Malaysia Airlines plane’s black box batteries stop “pinging,” the search will focus more heavily on sonar scans of the ocean bottom. That tactic was used to find Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009. It took two years to find the Air France jet.
Wednesday’s search included 10 planes, including a Gulfstream G650 jet reportedly owned by movie director Peter Jackson.
Copyright 2014 ABC News Radio