KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 23 – As the one year anniversary of missing flight MH370 approaches, Australian Transport Safety Bureau Commissioner Martin Dolan has expressed confidence that the aircraft will be found by May this year. He said he was confident of locating the Boeing 777 by the time the current search was complete.

Speaking to news.com (Australia), he said: “I don’t wake up every day thinking ‘this will be the day’ but I do wake up every day hoping this will be it, and expecting that sometime between now and May that will be the day.” He pointed out that it had been both baffling and unprecedented, not only the mystery of it, but also on the scale of what was being done to find the aircraft.

The Malaysian Airlines aircraft from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing went missing on March 8, 2014, an hour into its flight with 239 passengers and crew on board. The Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) said on the issue if nothing was found the Chinese, Malaysian and Australian Governments would consider the next step.

“What those next steps might be is what the three governments will need to consider,” a JACC spokesman said. Dolan said the mystery surrounding the complete absence of debris from MH370 was currently being re-examined by drift modelling experts. He said it would have been good to have found surface wreckage but they were not particularly surprised nothing had been located.

On the modelling, the commissioner said they were working with experts to look at where any potential floating wreckage might have drifted to. He pointed out that it was quite complex now and they expected to have an update on that soon, adding that they were not holding out any hope any surface wreckage would be detected.

He said much of the modelling was dependent on how the aircraft would have collided with the water and the extent to which the Boeing 777 remained intact. “We don’t know how much debris there would have been on the surface in the first place …. and it’s possible any floating wreckage may have sunk by now,” Dolan said.

Pocket News

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