KUALA LUMPUR, April 18 — Any expansion of the search for the missing flight MH370 beyond the current area of focus in the southern Indian Ocean would end up being futile, an aviation expert said in a report today after a high-level announcement that the search area could be doubled.

Sydney-based aviation professor Jason Middleton was quoted by TIME as saying that it is difficult to justify the decision to double the search area if no trace of the plane is found once the current search is completed.

“I’m not in the position of being one of the relatives, and I deeply sympathise with their situation. However, once the areas of highest priority have been searched there are diminishing returns when increasing the area,” he said in the report.

On Thursday, the transport ministers of Malaysia, Australia and China issued a joint statement pledging to double the current search area if necessary.

“Should the aircraft not be found within the current search area, ministers agreed to extend the search by an additional 60,000 square kilometres to bring the search area to 120,000 square kilometres and thereby cover the entire highest probability area identified by expert analysis,” the statement read.

Malaysian Transport Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai said at a news conference that the extended search would cost an estimated A$50 million (RM141.5 million) and would be borne by Malaysia and Australia.

Middleton questioned the decision to increase the search area, when officials had indicated at possibly scaling back efforts in earlier reports.

The academic attached with the University of New South Wales noted added that the budget for the expanded search would be better spent on improving future safety outcomes instead of “just ‘mowing the lawn’ in the ocean trying to find something”.

Middleton also claimed that the whole incident had been “highly politicised from the start” with the Malaysian government slow in releasing vital information and the reliance on satellite data analysis by British firm Inmarsat, which he claimed is “impossible” to corroborate due to lack of access to the company’s proprietary information.

“The Inmarsat stuff is untestable. And although I’m not suggesting they’ve done anything improper, the search area relies very much on their calculations, and if they have made errors, we are not able to replicate their calculations.

“And there’s a chance they’ve stuffed up and the plane is not there at all,” he said.

While official, the conclusion that MH370 “ended somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean” is not universally accepted, primarily due to the complete lack of physical evidence from the plane despite months of searching.

Military expert Andre Milne previously called the theory that MH370 was in the Indian Ocean a “criminal act of fabrication of evidence” as the hypothesis was not in any way corroborated.

MH370 was officially declared an aviation accident on January 29 by the Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation, and its missing passengers and crew presumed dead.

An international search has yet to recover any wreckage from Flight MH370 since it vanished without a trace en route to Beijing, China, from Kuala Lumpur on March 8 last year.