In this April 9, 2014 photo provided by the Australian Defense Force, a Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion flies past Australian Defense vessel Ocean Shield on a mission to drop sonar buoys to assist in the acoustic search of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean. Fifty-fifty, a Malaysian official said of how his country and Australia will split the bill for the increasingly massive search for the missing jetliner. Not so fast, Canberra responded. Malaysian and Australian officials discussed cost-sharing this week in the Australian capital, but Australian Transport Minister Warren Truss declined to say Friday, June 13, whether the country was even considering an even split of the bill for a search that will take months, if not years, and cost tens of millions of dollars at a minimum. AP
CANBERRA, Australia — An investigator says the next phase of the seabed search for the missing Malaysian plane will focus on an area of the Indian Ocean hundreds of kilometers (miles) south of the first suspected crash site.
Chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, Martin Dolan, said Friday that an announcement will be made next week on where a 60,000 square kilometer (23,000 square mile) search of the ocean floor for wreckage using powerful sonar equipment will be focused.
Dolan says he expects the most likely crash site will be hundreds of kilometers (miles) south of where a remote-controlled underwater drone scoured the seabed where acoustic signals suspected to have come from the plane's black boxes were thought to have come from. The Malaysia Airlines flight vanished March 8.