It changes nothing: Australia says confirmation of MH370 debris won’t alter crash site search
Search chief says Reunion island find is consistent with current search area in southern Indian Ocean, west of Australia
Australian authorities said this morning they were confident the search for MH370 was being carried out in the right area and the plane’s crash site would be found after Malaysia confirmed debris on an Indian Ocean island was from the missing flight.
“[The La Reunion find] is consistent with all the work we’ve done so we’re confident that we’re looking in the right area and we’ll find the aircraft there,” Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, told ABC radio.
But Dolan added that it was “too early to tell” what happened to the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet which disappeared 17 months ago, and that “close examination [of the flaperon found on Reunion] is what’s necessary to access how much we can learn”.
Australia has been leading the hunt for the plane which vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board in March last year.
Satellite and other data point to it coming down in the southern Indian Ocean and ships have been scouring more than 50,000 square kilometres of deep ocean floor for evidence.
Authorities plan to search a total of 120,000 square kilometres.
No evidence had been found until the wing part washed up on the French territory of La Reunion, which Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said early today was from the jet.