Officials vow to continue MH370 search despite no sign of wreckage

PERTH — Australia and Malaysia yesterday vowed to keep searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 plane, despite no sign of wreckage after almost seven weeks, and as bad weather again grounded aircraft and an undersea drone neared the end of its first full mission.

An Australian official yesterday said unidentified material that washed ashore 10km east of the town of Augusta in Western Australia is unlikely to have come from the lost jet. The debris is being examined for any link to the missing flight. On initial analysis, the material appeared to comprise sheet metal with rivets, reports said.

Mr Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, told AP: “We do not consider this likely to be of use to our search for MH370. At this stage, we are not getting excited.”

The finding of the unspecified material was the first report of suspected debris in weeks and the first since the detection of what were believed to be signals from the plane on April 4.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott had previously acknowledged that the search strategy could change if seabed scans taken by the United States Navy Bluefin-21 drone in the southern Indian Ocean failed to turn up a trace of the plane, which vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board.

“We may well rethink the search, but we will not rest until we have done everything we can to solve this mystery,” he said. “The only way we can get to the bottom of this is to keep searching the probable impact zone until we find something or until we have searched it as thoroughly as human ingenuity allows at this time.”

Australian Defence Minister David Johnston said the country was consulting with Malaysia, China and the US on the next phase of the search for the plane. He said more powerful towed side-scan commercial sonar equipment, similar to the remote-controlled subs that found RMS Titanic 3.8km under the surface of the Atlantic Ocean in 1985, would probably be deployed.

“The next phase, I think, is that we step up with potentially a more powerful, more capable side-scan sonar to do deeper water,” he said.

While the Bluefin-21 — a key component in the search after the detection of audio signals or “pings” believed to be from the plane’s black box flight recorder — had less than one-fifth of the seabed search area to complete, Mr Johnston estimated that the task would take another two weeks.

Malaysian Defence Minister and Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said the search authorities would need to “regroup and re-strategise” if nothing was found in the current search zone, but that the hunt would “always continue”.

“I can confirm that we are increasing the assets that are available for deep-sea search,” he said, adding that the government was seeking help from state oil company Petronas, which has expertise in deep-sea exploration.

Nearly two months after the jetliner vanished, Mr Hishammuddin announced that Malaysia’s Cabinet had approved the formation of an independent international investigation team to probe the causes of the baffling incident.

The experts who will be appointed to the panel would be named next week and the investigation could begin a week later, Malaysian officials said.

The Malaysian police are also conducting a criminal investigation into why the Boeing jet veered thousands of kilometres off course on a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The authorities yesterday suspended the air search for the second day in a row due to heavy rain, low cloud and big seas. Twelve ships will continue to help with the operation. AGENCIES