MH370 mystery: ‘Very surprised’ if no breakthrough in next 3-4 years, says Malaysia Airlines CEO
Scientific advances should yield some breakthroughs in three to four years, Malaysia Airlines CEO Peter Bellew
By Yen Nee Lee
The circumstances that brought down Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 remain one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries, but the carrier’s chief executive said he believed a breakthrough can be made within the next four years.
The plane, a Boeing 777, was carrying 239 people en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur when it vanished from radar screens in March 2014. Search operations concentrated in the southern Indian Ocean, but the aircraft was not found.
Pieces of debris were found at various locations, but the search was called off in January this year.
“(Given) the advances in scientific research around the location where the aircraft may have gone down ... I personally would be very surprised if in the next three or four years, we don’t get a breakthrough. I think that’s the timescale we’re looking at,” the airline’s CEO, Peter Bellew, told CNBC on Wednesday.
The 2014 double tragedy of MH370 and MH17 — an Amsterdam-Kuala Lumpur passenger flight that was shot down when it was flying over eastern Ukraine — aggravated Malaysia Airlines’ financial woes.