The search
for the missing Flight MH370 will now revert to an area hundreds of kilometers
south of the first suspected crash site, an official said today, as months of
fruitless scouring in the Indian Ocean has failed to crack the unprecedented
aviation mystery. In a dramatic development in the hunt for the Malaysia
Airlines plane, the search area in the Indian Ocean is to be moved back to a
zone 1,800 kilometres west of Perth, previously dismissed in late March. The
new search area, to be focused on when an underwater probe resumes in August,is
not be based on fresh data but on new analysis of the plane's flight path.
"All the trends of this analysis will move the search area south of where
it was. Just how much south is something that we're still working on,"
said Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety
Bureau. "There was a very complex analysis and there were several
different ways of looking at it. Specialists have used several different
methodologies and bringing all of that work together to get a consensus view is
what we're finalising at the moment," he said. The Joint Agency
Coordination Centre (JACC) will announce next week that the six-week analysis
of all information related to the Boeing 777's flight path has resulted in an
800 km shift in the search area to the south-west, The West Australian
newspaper reported citing US sources. The search area is still located on what
is termed the seventh arc, based on the Britain-based Inmarsat's satellite
signal contact with the plane - just much further south. The areas which will
now be the focus of the search were previously surveyed from the air, but the
undersea hunt was directed north after "pings" were heard which later
turned out to be bogus false alarms. The ATSB has not given out precise details
of the search to be undertaken, but the US sources have said that one of the
two ocean floor mapping vessels, Fugro Equator, is already operating in the new
area, while a second vessel, the Chinese navy's Zhu Kezhen, is en route to the
same area. The Beijing-bound Boeing 777-200 - carrying 239 people, including
five Indians, an Indo-Canadian and 154 Chinese nationals - mysteriously
vanished on March 8 en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.
Congress leader Manishankar Aiyar attracted opposition BJP's ire today in Rajya Sabha when he said he was not interested in listening to speech of a BJP member on vote on account, prompting the Chair to adjourn the House amid uproar. During the Zero Hour, Deputy Chairman P J Kurien allowed Aiyar, who wanted to ask a question, to do so, which was opposed by BJP members. Kurien asked Aiyar whether he yielded to allow others to speak, to which he said he had no objection and he can ask his question later. As the House got ready to initiate discussion on Vote on Account, Kurien said, "Let us reduce the discussion to two hours from four hours," which was opposed by BJP members including Piyush Goyal who was given a chance to speak on Vote on Account. When it was agreed that discussion will take place as per schedule, Aiyar remarked he was not interested in listening to the speech by BJP member. "You had given me the chance to ask a question
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