Download The possibility of finding floating debris from missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has become highly unlikely, and a new phase of the search will focus on a far larger area of the Indian Ocean floor, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Monday. The search for Flight MH370, which vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8 with 239 people on board, including 154 Chinese passengers, has so far failed to find any trace of the plane. Abbott said that efforts will now shift from the visual searches that had been conducted by planes and ships to underwater equipment capable of scouring the ocean floor with sophisticated sensors, Reuters reported. But he conceded that it was possible nothing would be found of the jetliner. "We will do everything we humanly can, everything we reasonably can, to solve this mystery," he told reporters in Canberra. Malaysia, China, Japan, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Britain and the United States are assisting Australia in the most expensive search in aviation history. It remains unclear what caused the Boeing 777 to veer sharply off course and disappear from radar as it prepared to enter Vietnamese airspace. Malaysian authorities have not ruled out mechanical problems, but say evidence suggests it was deliberately diverted from its scheduled route. Malaysia is under pressure to bring closure to the grieving families by finding wreckage to definitively determine what happened to the aircraft. |