Why hasn't MH370 been found?: "We've been looking in the wrong place"

Top searchers at the Dutch company leading the underwater hunt for Malaysia Airlines jet MH370 say they believe the plane may have glided down rather than dived in the final moments, meaning they have been scouring the wrong patch of ocean for two years.

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We've been looking in the wrong place, MH370 search team says

SYDNEY, July 21 (Reuters) – Top searchers at the Dutch company leading the underwater hunt for Malaysia Airlines jet MH370 say they believe the plane may have glided down rather than dived in the final moments, meaning they have been scouring the wrong patch of ocean for two years.

Flight MH370 disappeared in March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew onboard en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. Searchers led by engineering group Fugro have been combing an area roughly the size of Greece for two years.

That search, over 120,000 square kilometres of the southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia, is expected to end in three months and could be called off after that following a meeting of key countries Malaysia, China and Australia on Friday. So far, nothing has been found.

"If it's not there, it means it's somewhere else," Fugro project director Paul Kennedy told Reuters.

This undated handout photo released by the Australia Transport Safety Bureau on July 20, 2016 shows Malaysian and Australian investigators examining a piece of aircraft debris found on Pemba Island off the coast of Tanzania. Transport ministers from Australia, China and Malaysia will meet July 22, 2016 to discuss the future of the frustrating deep-sea search for missing flight MH370, officials said July 20. / AFP PHOTO / ATSB / Handout /

While Kennedy does not exclude extreme possibilities that could have made the plane impossible to spot in the search zone, he and his team argue a more likely option is the plane glided down – meaning it was manned at the end – and made it beyond the area marked out by calculations from satellite images.

"If it was manned it could glide for a long way," Kennedy said.

"You could glide it for further than our search area is, so I believe the logical conclusion will be well maybe that is the other scenario."

Deciding the search area in 2014, authorities assumed the plane had no "inputs" during its final descent, meaning there was no pilot or no conscious pilot. They believe it was on auto-pilot and spiralled when it ran out of fuel.

But Kennedy said a skilled pilot could glide the plane approximately 120 miles (193 km) from its cruising altitude after running out of fuel. One pilot told Reuters it would be slightly less than that.

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