KUALA LUMPUR--Relatives of people aboard the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 urged governments on Thursday to step up the hunt for the aircraft, a day before a meeting where ministers could decide to call off the search.
Malaysian, Chinese and Australian ministers will meet in Kuala Lumpur on Friday to discuss the future of the search for MH370, which disappeared during a flight from the Malaysian capital to Beijing in March 2014, carrying 239 people.
Almost A$180 million ($135 million) has been spent on an underwater search spanning 120,000 square kilometres in the southern Indian Ocean, the most expensive in aviation history. Jacquita Gonzales, the wife of MH370 steward Patrick Gomes, said China and Malaysia had not contributed enough to the search effort, which is coordinated by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
"China, you could do more. I'm sorry for being so frank but you have the most at stake here," she said at a news conference. Most of the passengers aboard MH370 were Chinese nationals.
"(Malaysia), you need to do your bit and not just say 'I'm so sorry, we're short of funds, there's nowhere else to search'," Gonzales said.
K.S. Narendran, whose wife was a passenger on MH370, called on the Malaysian government to seek help in securing funding. "This country and its leadership have wealthy friends. And I suppose therefore, there really should be no argument for a paucity of funds," he said.
The three governments had previously agreed that unless any new credible evidence arose, they would not extend the search which was originally scheduled to end in June but has been hampered by bad weather and is expected to resume in December.
Top searchers at the Dutch company leading the underwater hunt say they believe the plane may have glided down rather than dived in the final moments, meaning they have been scouring the wrong patch of ocean for two years. Searchers led by engineering group Fugro have been combing an area roughly the size of Greece for two years.
"If it's not there, it means it's somewhere else," Fugro project director Paul Kennedy told Reuters.
Kennedy does not exclude extreme possibilities that could have made the plane impossible to spot in the search zone, and still hopes to find the craft. But he and his team argue another option is the plane glided down - meaning it was manned at the end - and made it beyond the area marked out by calculations from satellite images.
"If it was manned it could glide for a long way," Kennedy said. "You could glide it for further than our search area is, so I believe the logical conclusion will be well maybe that is the other scenario."
Doubts that the search teams are looking in the right place will likely fuel calls for all data to be made publicly available so that academics and rival companies can pursue an "open source" solution - a collaborative public answer to the airline industry's greatest mystery.
Fugro's controlled glide hypothesis is also the first time officials have leant some support to contested theories that someone was in control during the flight's final moments. Since the crash there have been competing theories over whether one, both or no pilots were in control, whether it was hijacked - or whether all aboard perished and the plane was not controlled at all when it hit the water. Adding to the mystery, investigators believe someone may have deliberately switched off the plane's transponder before diverting it thousands of miles.
The glide view is not supported by the investigating agencies: America's Boeing Co, France's Thales SA, U.S. investigator the National Transportation Safety Board, British satellite company Inmarsat PLC, the U.K. Air Accidents Investigation Branch and the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation.
