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.
BULLION ASSOCIATION SUPPORTS MODI The Bombay Bullion Association Ltd (BBA), the apex body of bullion and jewellery bodies in the country, has announced its support for Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as BJP's prime ministerial candidate. BBA president Mohit Kamboj along with some others joined BJP in the presence of senior party leader Gopinath Munde here yesterday. BBA had extended its support to Modi as the UPA government had brought about a "policy paralysis" in the economy, Kamboj said. "There are over 50 lakh workers associated with the bullion and gold industry, which has been facing the brunt of the current policies of the UPA government. "We at BBA strongly believe that a Modi-led NDA government would normalise the industry by introducing friendly policies," he added. Members of Bharat Diamond Bourse have said they will host Modi at a function at Bandra-Kurla Complex here on Sept. 30. BJP president Rajnath Singh had last ...
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