Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott yesterday suggested the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 might be scaled back, while expressing hope the aircraft would be found a year after it vanished.
The aircraft disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8 last year with 239 people on board. No trace has been found, despite a massive surface and underwater hunt.
“I do reassure the families of our hope and expectation that the ongoing search will succeed,” Abbott told parliament in Canberra. “I can’t promise that the search will go on at this intensity forever, but we will continue our very best efforts to resolve this mystery and provide some answers.”
His comments came as a group representing the families of MH370 passengers — the majority of which were Chinese — released a statement insisting that the search “must continue.”
Australia is leading the hunt in the Indian Ocean about 1,000km off its west coast, with four ships using sophisticated sonar systems to scour a huge area.
The vessels are focusing on a 60,000km2 priority zone, with the search scheduled to end in May. More than 40 percent of the ocean floor has been explored to date.
Weather conditions in the remote region are expected to worsen after May.
The agency coordinating the search, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, has previously said a decision on continuing after the current hunt was is completed up to the Australian and Malaysian governments.
The families of some of the Australian victims were in parliament when Abbott made his statement, as was Malaysian High Commissioner Zainal Abidin Ahmad, Chinese Ambassador Ma Zhaoxu (馬朝旭) and representatives of other nations that lost citizens.
The MH370 passengers’ families yesterday said in a statement on a Chinese messaging app that “the search must continue and all options explored if nothing is found in the coming weeks.”
“We do not accept [Malaysia’s] proclamation and will not give up hope until we have definitive proof of a crash and a determination of location — even if it is just one piece of the wreckage,” they said.
Abbott said the plane’s disappearance “demonstrated a fundamental gap in tracking long-haul flights, particularly over the oceans.”
Australia, Malaysia and Indonesia plan to trial a “world first” system that increases the tracking of aircraft over remote oceans to a minimum rate of every 15 minutes from current intervals of 30 to 40 minutes.
“While it is not a complete answer, it will deliver immediate improvements in the way we track aircraft while more comprehensive solutions are developed and implemented,” Abbott said of the system, announced on Sunday.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.