Top searchers at the Dutch company leading the underwater hunt for Malaysia Airlines jet MH370 say they believe the plane may have glided down rather than dived in the final moments, meaning they have been scouring the wrong patch of ocean for two years.
Flight MH370 disappeared in March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew onboard en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. Searchers led by engineering group Fugro have been combing an area roughly the size of Greece for two years.
That search, over 120,000 square kilometers of the southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia, is expected to end in three months and could be called off after that following a meeting of key countries Malaysia, China and Australia on Friday. So far, nothing has been found.
Doubts that the search teams are looking in the right place will likely fuel calls for all data to be made publicly available so that academics and rival companies can pursue an "open source" solution - a collaborative public answer to the airline industry's greatest mystery.
Since the crash there have been competing theories over whether one, both or no pilots were in control, whether it was hijacked - or whether all aboard perished and the plane was not controlled at all when it hit the water. Adding to the mystery, investigators believe someone may have deliberately switched off the plane's transponder before diverting it thousands of miles.
The glide view is not supported by the investigating agencies: America's Boeing Co, France's Thales SA, U.S. investigator the National Transportation Safety Board, British satellite company Inmarsat PLC, the U.K. Air Accidents Investigation Branch and the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation.
