An Australian exploration company says it may have traced the debris of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in the Bay of Bengal.
GeoResonance says its research has identified materials on the ocean floor that may be from a plane, reports 7News.
The spot the company reportedly located the ‘materials’ in the Bay is 5,000 kilometres from where the authorities have been looking for the plane.
Flight MH370 went off the radar while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on Mar 8 with 239 people on board.
Six weeks have now passed and extensive searches in the Indian Ocean have failed to yield results.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Monday said the chance of finding floating debris from the jetliner was highly unlikely.
He said a new phase of the search will focus on a far larger area of the Indian Ocean floor.
Malaysia, China, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Britain and the United States are assisting Australia in conducting the most expensive search in aviation history.
The US Navy Bluefin-21 underwater drone searching the seabed has so far failed to find any sign of the plane.
“We are still baffled and disappointed that we haven’t been able to find undersea wreckage based on those detections,” Reuters quoted Abbott as telling reporters.
Photo: 7News Adelaide
He said the new search area, which spans 700km by 80km (435 miles by 40 miles), could take between six and eight months to completely examine, at a cost to Australia of as much as A$60 million ($55.69 million).
But GeoResonance believes authorities have been “looking in the wrong place”.
It started its own search for the missing aircraft on Mar 10.
“The technology that we use was originally designed to find nuclear warheads, submarines… our team in the Ukraine decided we should try and help,” the Adelaide-based 7News quoted David Pope from GeoResonance as saying.
The company has surveyed over 2,000,000 square kilometres of the possible crash zone, using images obtained from satellites and aircraft.
Scientists focused their efforts north of the flight’s last known location, using over 20 technologies to analyse the data including a nuclear reactor.
Pope said they were “very excited” at finding what they believed to be the wreckage of a commercial airliner.
Pavel Kursa from GeoResonance told 7News: “We identified chemical elements and materials that make up a Boeing 777… these are aluminium, titanium, copper, steel alloys and other materials.”
The team sent an initial report to the authorities while the black box still had two weeks of battery power left.
They said they verified the findings by analysing images from the same area on Mar 5, three days before the plane’s disappearance.
“The wreckage wasn’t there prior to the disappearance of MH370,” Pope said.
The full report was submitted on Apr 15.
“We’re not trying to say that it definitely is MH370, however it is a lead we feel should be followed up,” Pope told 7News.
Source: Bd news24