KUALA LUMPUR, March 25 — Malaysia will continue searching for flight MH370 even if other countries decide to pull out in the future, Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein said today, reiterating that the crisis of the missing airliner is unlikely to end anytime soon.
“We will continue the search based on expertise from the French team,” the acting transport minister told a press conference here when asked whether Malaysia would continue its search efforts if other countries pulled out in the future.
Hishammuddin said French investigators had briefed him extensively on the “challenges” they faced when trying to locate Air France Flight 447 after it went down in the Atlantic Ocean, off Brazil on June 1, 2009.
In the French incident, debris from the missing plane was spotted five days later. But it took a total of nearly two years for the investigation team to salvage the major pieces of the wreckage and recover human remains from the ocean floor.
“This information has been shared with relevant teams,” the minister said today.
Hishammuddin repeated that Malaysia remains the coordinator of the multinational search effort and will continue to manage the operation based on “corroborated and verified information”.
He noted that the effort had brought search teams from the initial search areas in the South China Sea and Straits of Malacca to the current hunt in the southern Indian Ocean.
“It is a very complicated process that looks at satellite data, primary and secondary radar... all sorts of leads that need to be corroborated.
“That will continue, and this is something that I assured everybody, that the process in which we want to get the possible location of MH370 has been a process that we have never moved away from,” he said.
Hishammuddin said that with the narrowing of the search area — which now covers an area spanning nearly 470,000 square nautical miles — Malaysia is now looking at securing the use of “specific assets”.
He explained that the nature of the search requires deep sea search capabilities and also specific equipment to locate the plane’s black box.
Hishammuddin said the US has agreed to use its “ping locater” — a device to seek out the black box — which is now en route to Perth, Australia, where it will be fitted on an offshore support vessel, the Ocean Shield.
Once outfitted on the ship, Ocean Shield will join a fleet of at least half a dozen Chinese ships and several aircraft already despatched to the refined search area on April 5.
