New MH370 search zone to be announced by month's end: JACC

SYDNEY: The new search zone to hunt Flight MH370 will be announced by month's end, Australian officials said today, a day after a UK satellite firm claimed that the most likely crash site was yet to be targeted.

"The search area will be confirmed before the end of June, after completion of extensive collaborative analysis by a range of specialists," the Joint Agency Coordination Centre which is leading the search operations said.

"It is already clear from the provisional results of that analysis that the search zone will move, but still be on the seventh arc (where the aircraft last communicated with satellite)," it said in a statement.

This comes a day after the UK satellite firm Inmarsat claimed that the search for the Malaysia Airlines plane is yet to target a "hotspot" most likely to be the crash site in the Indian Ocean as priority was given to investigate "pings" that has led to a dead end.

Inmarsat told the BBC that the search for the missing jet was yet to go to the area its scientists think is the plane's most likely crash site.

Inmarsat's communications with the aircraft are seen as the best clues to the whereabouts of Flight MH370.

Meanwhile, the Australian contracted survey vessel Fugro Equator has commenced operations in a defined search area, joining Chinese navy ship Zhu Kezhen in undertaking survey activities.

Under the direction of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), the two vessels are conducting the bathymetric survey or mapping of the sea floor which is crucial to carrying out the deep water search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane that is scheduled to commence in August.

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.

"At the end of May, Zhu Kezhen suffered a defect to its multi-beam echosounder and came into the port of Fremantle to enable the necessary repairs to be conducted. The defect has been rectified and the ship will resume operations in the search area shortly," the JACC said.

So far, the Zhu Kezhen has surveyed 4,088 square kilometres of the ocean floor, it said.

The ships may take at least three months to complete the bathymetric survey of the 60,000 square kilometre search zone.

The ships will regularly send survey data to the ATSB and Geoscience Australia. This data will be used to progressively build a map of the search area.