SYDNEY/PERTH — The search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 entered its 44th day yesterday as Australian search officials said a crucial series of sonar scans of the Indian Ocean floor could be completed within a week. The air, surface and underwater search is now focused on footage taken by a United States Navy deep-sea drone, which has narrowed its target range to a tight 10km circle of sea floor.

The Bluefin-21 autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) has spent the past week scouring the remote and largely unmapped stretch of ocean floor about 2,000km north-west of the Australian city of Perth for signs of the plane, which disappeared on March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

The remote controlled submarine is now in its eighth deep-sea mission with no sign of wreckage so far. The drone has searched about half its targeted area, the authorities said yesterday.

The Malaysian government has said the search is at a very critical juncture and asked for prayers for its success. Malaysian Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said on Saturday that the government may consider using more AUVs and that the scope of the search may be broadened if it continued to turn up no leads.

Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Hamzah Zainuddin met relatives of the passengers in Kuala Lumpur yesterday and discussed ways of providing them with financial assistance. He said family members were urged to submit a plan for consideration and that a fund could possibly be set up by the government or Malaysia Airlines.

Mr Hamzah also added that he would soon visit Beijing to shore up bilateral relations between Malaysia and China. Two-thirds of the missing plane’s 227 passengers were Chinese and many of their family members have been angered by Malaysia’s handling of the investigation.

The current underwater search in the southern Indian Ocean is centred on an area where one of four acoustic signals, believed to be from the plane’s black box recorders, was detected on April 8. Hopes for further black box signals have diminished since the black-box batteries are now two weeks past their 30-day expected life span.

Up to 11 aircraft and 12 ships yesterday scanned the ocean surface for debris from the Boeing 777.

The search coordination centre has said the hunt for floating debris on the surface would continue for at least the next few days, even though the Australian head of the search effort, Mr Angus Houston, had earlier said it was expected to end sooner. AGENCIES