Malaysia Airlines MH370: Search enters new phase with new hope

Its been two months since Malaysia AirlinesFlight 370 vanished from the sky, and as the search for the missing plane enters a new phase, experts saydiscovery of the aircraft could still be months oryears away.

The fact they havent found anything after two months in this circumstance isnt surprising,"Brad deYoung, professor of oceanography at Memorial University in St. John's, told CBC News on Wednesday. "And if anybody was offering that 'Yes we would find it quickly,' then theyve never done this before."

A lot of the talking heads on thisI saw a few people and I would just laugh when they would say things," deYoung said. "Their enthusiasm and their expectation for success were completely unrealistic initially.

DeYoung said the plane, which disappeared on March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing,is certainly "findable" but the search poses many challenges.

The deep and vastsearch area may seem like the biggest obstacle in locating the plane.But wreckage from the Air France Flight 447 crash in 2009, which was eventually located, also covered a large searcharea. The difference is that officials had a pretty exact idea where Flight 447when down.

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"Ithinkthe biggest challenge is they really dont have a good fix on where [MH370] ended,"MarySchiavo, aviation analyst and former inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation, told CBC News. "Noone went looking for the plane on a timely basis so they had any hope of finding whereit went down."

"They certainly won't find it in the next couple weeks or couple months," Schiavo said. "Theres lots of other places to look before Id say its not possible to find it. Im still hopeful that they will find it."

The intensive hunt for the plane has incorporated a search of nearly 4.64 million square kilometres of ocean and utilized more than 33 search flights, translating to over3,000 hours spent in the air.

Australian Transport Minister Warren Truss, speaking to reporters earlier this week, gave a rather blunt assessment of their search efforts thus far.

Unfortunately, all of that effort has found nothing, he said.

Any commentary about when we're likely to find this aircraft has to be just that commentary, he added. We obviously have no idea when it's likely to be found, we just always hope it's tomorrow. But so far our very, very best leads, days when we were quite confident that this was going to be the day, have all proved fruitless, and so I think it would be unduly optimistic to name a day or a time.

'Intensified undersea search'

Meanwhile, in the coming weeks, the search will transition to an intensified undersea search of a 60,000-square-kilometre patch of seafloorin the Indian Ocean off western Australia and wheresounds consistent with a plane's black box were detected in early April.

The area became the focus of the hunt after a team of analysts calculated the plane's likeliest flight path based on satellite and radar data.

Officials will continue to use the unmanned subBluefin-21, an autonomous vehicle being lent out by the U.S. Navy.

But deYoung said the Bluefin-21 has its limitations. It has to be lowered down and brought back up every day, have its batteries recharged, andall itsdata downloaded and examined.

Theyre good, they work well, they dont move that quickly and they dont cover huge areas," he added.

Officials are hoping to use more specialized equipment that can dive deeper than the Bluefin vessel, and that will be able to send information back to crews in real time.

"If theyre in the right area,thenslow and steady wins the game maybe and maybe Bluefin on its own is fine," deYoung said.

Part of the problem is the search crew is in unchartered waters and no one really knows exactly how deep the water in the search area is.

Who will foot the bill?

If you knew theinitialregionyou couldeasilyprogram yourvehicle andyour survey, becauseyou know whatyouregoing to find, more or less. And thenyou're justlooking for an airplane," deYoung said. "Rightnow theyre probably doing the first reallydetailedsea bed maps that haveeverbeen done there."

But all this is costly and has raised questions as to who will foot the bill.

"What Im worried about is the [Malaysian] governmentnot going to pour any more money to Malaysia Airlines," Schiavo said. "So ifthey stop funding the airlines, how committedare they going to be financially to this investigation?"

Cost estimates for the first phase of the search have hovered around$50 million, with the second phase pinned at another $60 million. But most experts predict the costs could end up beingin the hundreds of millions of dollars

I think theyre at a crossroads in terms of where to getequipment to do it and where to get money," Schiavo said.

Truss suggested there will be futurediscussions about cost sharingwithMalaysia,China and other parties, including companies like Boeing and Rolls Royce,who may have vested interests in what happened.

He said they will also seekout international partners to acquire more equipment, and that the majority will have to be provided by the private sector.

"Clearly they now realize that this is going to be an 'in for the long haul' kind of a search," deYoung said.

"If they open uptheirsearchradius significantlyin the next phase then that might be asignthatthey'renot completely confident thepingswere from the plane.And if thats true, now the time scale forthesearchinggoesup from a fewyearsto many years and many ships."