KUALA LUMPUR, March 6 — Malaysian and Australian authorities continue to hold on to the belief that Flight MH370 will be found, days before the first anniversary of the plane’s mysterious disappearance.

Malaysian Defence Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein said today that there is still a long way to go in completing the on-going search for the Malaysia Airlines jetliner in the southern Indian Ocean.

“But we remain committed to the families. My heart goes out to the families (of those) on board the aircraft and to those involved in this mammoth undertaking,” he was quoted as saying in Langkawi by local daily New Straits Times.

Hishammuddin, who was acting transport minister when the plane went missing in the pre-dawn hours of March 8 last year, insisted that the responsibility falls on the three countries leading the international search – Malaysia, Australia and China – to carry on looking and giving the families of those on board the plane hope “that we will find the plane”.

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Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) director Peter Foley is also confident that the plane will be found, even after 40 per cent of the 60,000 sq km “priority zone” where the Boeing 777 is believed to have ended its journey yielded no clues as to its whereabouts.

Foley told Australian paper The Age that he has already laid out a “pre-packaged plan” to answer all the questions regarding the plane’s disappearance “when we find MH370 on the seafloor”.

“I know at some point I’ll get a call in the middle of the night... it will come,” he said.

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Foley added that they have deployed the best technology in the search effort – four vessels towing sophisticated sonar equipment – and expects they will have “no difficulty” in finding the plane.

Paul Kennedy of Fugro Survey – a Dutch company hired by Australia to look for flight MH370’s wreckage – echoed Foley’s optimism even after months of searching that yielded no results, saying that he anticipates a call “from the guys on the boat, every day”.

“I expect it anytime. I thoroughly believe we will run over it, and the guys will say, ‘Guess what we’ve found’, and then we will move on to the next phase,” Kennedy was quoted as saying by the New York Times.

Fugro, which was contracted by the ATSB in June 2014 to map out the seabed of the search area in preparation for the exhaustive search, and currently has three vessels deployed in the area.

A fourth vessel engaged in the search is owned by Perth-based oil and gas services company Go Marine Group was hired by Phoenix International – the company contracted by Malaysia and its national oil company Petronas, according to earlier reports.

Earlier this week, Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss was quoted by news agency Reuters as saying that discussions on whether to call the search off “are already under way”.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot denied the claim, though he conceded during his homage to MH370 in his country’s parliament that he “can’t promise that the search will go on at this intensity forever.”

Flight MH370 vanished while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing last March, along with 239 passengers and crew.

It is believed to have gone down in one of the deepest and most remote areas of the Indian Ocean, several hundred kilometres off the coast of Western Australia, where search efforts are underway.