KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 4 ― Additional budget cuts to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) is forcing the agency leading the probe on missing Malaysia Airlines (MAS) Flight MH370 to undertake “fewer investigations” to locate the plane that has been missing since March.

Daily Mail Australia reported that ATSB Chief Commissioner Martin Dolan said this was necessary despite categorising the search for the missing plane as the “greatest challenge” his agency has faced to date.

“At the same time as we were required to undertake difficult decisions in relation to our staffing and resources, we received the news of the loss of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and of its possible location in the Southern Indian Ocean, in Australia’s Search and Rescue Zone.

“For the foreseeable future, we will be able to undertake fewer investigations and we will need to carefully consider and constrain the scope of investigations initiated,” he said.

The daily reported that ATSB has cut 12 per cent of its staff due to a A$2 million (RM5.8 million) cut to its budget.

The Daily Mail reported that 10 transport investigators are among those who left the transport safety regulator after it reduced its staff from 116 to 104 since July last year.

Dolan noted that while the agency was given additional funding from the Australian government for the search, “there would continue to be pressure on ATSB resources”.

“(MH370) is the most serious aviation occurrence ever to involve the ATSB and its precursors, and is arguably the most mystifying, expansive and difficult search operation ever undertaken in the history of commercial aircraft,” he said.

The ATSB also deployed two investigators to the Ukraine in July after another Malaysian Airlines plane, flight MH17 was shot down by a missile with a number of Australians on-board, according to the Daily Mail.

Nearly nine months have passed since MH370’s mysterious disappearance and still there has been no sign of the jumbo passenger jet.

Searchers have been relying on the flight’s radar tracks and cryptic electronic conversations between the aircraft and satellite communications firms, which have indicated that MH370 mysteriously diverted off its planned flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing towards the southern Indian Ocean, an area more than a thousand miles southwest of the coast of Perth in Australia.

But adding to the already arduous search is the lack of a single shred of physical evidence to prove the Boeing 777 jetliner had indeed gone down in that particular part of the world shortly after it left Malaysian shores in the early morning of March 8.