Families call for MH370 search to continue

Families of Australian and Chinese passengers lost on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have called for a new search.

The Seabed Constructor ship used in the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. Picture: AFP

Families of Australian and Chinese passengers lost on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 have called for a new search, with some recommending scouring an area identified by an international group of senior airline pilots.

The call comes after the new Malaysian government said on Wednesday that the underwater survey by the private US company Ocean Infinity will end on Tuesday, having searched about 100,000sq km, and that the “no find, no fee” contract would not be extended.

The lobby group MH370 China Families, representing relatives of the 153 Chinese passengers who were among the 239 people on board, said: “We would welcome an initiative to search the area of 4300sq km around S39.2, E88.4, to clarify what is and what is not true.”

The latitude and longitude coordinates are those identified by British pilot Simon Hardy, Australian pilot Byron Bailey, New Zealand-born pilot Mike Keane, and British engineer and mathematician Robin Stevens as MH370’s resting place, based on calculations around the scenario that the aircraft captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, hijacked his own plane and flew it to a controlled ditching.

MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, on a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, reversing course 40 minutes into the flight when its radar transponder was turned off and radio contact ceased. Automatic satellite tracking shows it ended up in the southern Indian Ocean.

The first hunt over three years of 120,000sq km, led by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, did not search all of the area first proposed by Captain Hardy because the bureau accepted the theory that the pilots were incapacitated at the end of the flight and the Boeing 777 crashed down rapidly after running out of fuel on autopilot.

The airline captains believe Zaharie was able to fly the plane about 100 nautical miles farther southwest than the ATSB looked.

The Chinese group has not accepted the official theory of where MH370 ended up, with some insisting it may have been hijacked to a remote airstrip perhaps somewhere in central Asia. A statement to The Australian said its call to search the proposed 4300sq km was “not to be construed as our believing MH370 would be found there”.

Danica Weeks, who lost her husband, Paul, on the flight leaving her to raise two boys alone, said Australia should encourage the new Malaysian government to release all available information about the flight.

“I think it’s time to step up and for Malcolm Turnbull and Julie Bishop to say to them, ‘Give us what you’ve got’,” she said.

“You can’t put 239 innocent lives on a shelf.”

Malaysia’s new Transport Minister, Anthony Loke, said the new government was committed to transparency and would ­release details in due course.