MH370 search 'on track'
Australia's air crash investigator has dismissed reports there is disagreement among the five teams calculating the search area for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
The Boeing 777 is believed to have crashed off WA on March 8 with 239 people aboard, including six Australians.
Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief commissioner Martin Dolan said yesterday there were two priority search areas for MH370 because the teams had used different methodologies to calculate the likely flight paths of the plane based on satellite communications data.
Britain's Inmarsat, America's Boeing, France's Thales Group, US investigator the National Transportation Safety Board and the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation are the teams.
Mr Dolan said there was at first consensus among the five groups, based on the data available at the time, but once the data had been refined, "the results from the methodologies did not coincide exactly".
"There is no disagreement - just the deliberate application of differing analysis models," he said.
All teams agree MH370's final resting place is near "the 7th arc" - a curve that stretches from about 1000km off Exmouth to a point about 2000km south-west of Perth.
Originally the teams agreed an area about 600km long by 90km wide west of Perth was most likely.
A new report released last month specified two high-priority areas further to the south.
As a result, the ATSB increased its mapping of the sea floor to cover the more southerly sections of the arc and then allocated two search ships to search the two priority areas that had been determined based on those analyses.
Mr Dolan said though there was reasonably "high confidence" that the plane was in the priority search areas, this did not include all the possible derived paths.
He said further refinement and simulation assessment was continuing, though the likelihood of further significant change was low.
Three ships are now involved in the search.
More than 6900sqkm of sea floor has been searched.
