KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 26 ― The hunt for Malaysia Airlines (MAS) Flight MH370 has been hampered further by disagreements among the five search teams over where to look for the aircraft that has been missing since March 8, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported.

The international newspaper said the dispute among the teams, comprising Boeing, Inmarsat, France’s Thales Group, the United States’ National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), and the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation, has also led to search vessels being deployed in two different priority search areas.

Faced with uncertainties, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) chief commissioner Martin Dolan said that searchers may only be able to scour about 80 per cent of MH370’s probably crash sites before government funding for the effort runs dry.

WSJ reported that the Australian government has set aside as much as AUD52 million (nearly RM150 million) for the latest phase of the operation.

The report said the funding includes efforts to map the seabed to identify potential hazards to equipment, such as deep trenches and underwater volcanoes.

“Originally we thought we had a consensus among the five groups, based on the best data available at the time.

“Once we refined the data again the methodologies diverged,” Dolan was quoted telling WSJ in an interview.

WSJ reported that two vast areas where MH370 was suspected to have crashed were picked by Australian authorities last month, based on different models of analysing communications between the Boeing 777 and an Inmarsat PLC satellite.

It said that one method assumed the plane flew on autopilot until it ran out of fuel, whilst another assumed nothing about how the plane was being flown and sought to only to find flight paths which corresponded with satellite signals from the plane.

WSJ also quoted an unnamed sonar expert experienced in deep-sea recovery efforts as expressing doubts over the success rate of locating the plane, given the dispute-filled atmosphere among stakeholders in the search.

The daily also drew parallels between the search for MH370, to the two-year underwater search for  Air France 447 plane which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, saying that similar disagreements among investigators at the time had also complicated search efforts.

It reported that Air France, Airbus and French investigators had also repeatedly clamoured over methodologies and ways to locate Flight 447.

In a Bloomberg report today, MH370 search director at the ATSB Peter Foley said that a deep-sea sonar search for Flight 370 will find its wreckage, after 263 days of scouring the seas yielded nothing.

Foley reportedly said that searchers for the plane, which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board, are “very confident” the plane will be found along an arc in the southern Indian Ocean matching the last transmission from the plane.

Bloomberg reported that no trace of the Boeing Co 777-200 has been found more than eight months after it disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and that Foley did not report any findings from close sonar scans of the sea floor that have been ongoing since October 6.

The news agency said that two boats have scanned about 6,900 square kilometres (2,700 square miles) of the ocean floor so far and a third has been redeployed to carry out ship-based surveys while it waits for new equipment, search coordinators said November 19.