The Australian-led search for the crash site of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 will continue scanning the seabed 2,000km west of the Western Australian coastline, despite confirmation that a Boeing 777 flaperon found on Réunion island last week belonged to the missing plane.
On Wednesday the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (Jacc), which is overseeing the underwater search, said it was confident the discovery was consistent with the crash site being within the search area.
Réunion is about 4,000km from the search area, which was doubled to 120,000 sq km in April. But the latest ocean drift modelling released by the CSIRO shows wreckage could be strewn anywhere between the search area and the shores of Madagascar.
“Drift modelling by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation [CSIRO] shows that material from the current search area could have been carried to La Réunion, as well as other locations, as part of a progressive dispersal of floating debris through the action of ocean currents and wind,” the Jacc said.
The indicative drift modelling, dated 30 July, casts an impossibly wide net for floating debris, spanning hundreds of thousands of kilometres of largely empty ocean.
It suggests that in the 16 months since the crash the debris is likely to have drifted north and west of the crash site.
Once a piece of debris is found it will be tracked using the same modelling in an attempt to pinpoint the crash site. But the Jacc warned that the more time that passed before debris was found, the less accurate it would be.
“Reverse drift modelling – tracking the debris back from where it was found to a possible point of origin – is very imprecise when used for long time periods,” the Jacc’s latest update said. However, “to the extent they can be relied on, the results of reverse modelling are also consistent with the defined search area”.
The Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, announced late on Wednesday that the two-metre wing fragment was part of MH370.
“Today, 515 days since the plane disappeared, it is with a very heavy heart that I must tell you that an international team of experts has conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris ... is indeed MH370,” Razak said.
The Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, said the underwater search for the rest of the plane, which has so far cost more than A$100m, would continue.
“We owe it to the hundreds of millions of people who use our skies, we owe it to the 24 million Australians who use our skies, we owe it to them to try to ensure that air travel is as safe as it possibly can be, to try to get to the bottom of this terrible mystery,” he said on Thursday.
So far underwater survey ships have mapped close to 60,000 sq km of the sea floor to find the plane, which disappeared with 239 people on board on 8 March 2014.
One of the two search ships, the Fugro Discovery, left Fremantle for the search area on Tuesday night after a four-day stopover to resupply and familiarise a new crew. It will reach the search area on 12 August, crossing paths with the Fugro Equator, which left the search area on Wednesday and is expected to make port in Fremantle on the same day.
The search area was extrapolated from the likely flight path of the plane based on its last eight satellite pings, which suggest it headed towards the southern Indian Ocean.
