A Dutch firm has been awarded a contract worth $52 million to look for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
Warren Truss, Australia's deputy prime minister, said he was still 'cautiously optimistic' that MH370 will be found, the Guardian reports.
Truss said the Dutch company Furgo was chosen because it offered "the best value-for-money technical solution".
The announcement comes five months after MH370 went missing between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing with 239 passengers on board. Investigators are still no closer to discovering what happened to the plane, but believe that it crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.
Furgo will take charge of a new phase of the search operation in September, which will last for up to a year. The team will use sonar scanning to explore 23,000 square miles of seabed, roughly the size of Tasmania, which a surveying company has been mapping for the past several weeks.
Martin Dolan of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said he hoped the team would at least find "traces of where the aircraft has entered the water so we can provide closure to the families involved and information to support the investigation".
Truss said that the downing of flight MH17 had not affected their search for MH370 but did admit that both the airline and the Malaysian government were forced to focus on the most recent of "two extraordinary circumstances".
Flight MH370 families were 'punched' by Chinese police
28 July
Two grieving family members of flight MH370 passengers claim they were "punched and beaten" by Chinese police officers, while two children were among 16 relatives to be locked up for nearly 24 hours.
The two female relatives said they were dragged and punched by six local police officers on 19 May after asking for the release of two other family members – a father and daughter – who had been detained. They claim the attack left them with numerous bruises and the elder of the two women had to stay in hospital for three days.
In a separate incident, 16 relatives were reportedly detained by police for nearly 24 hours on 14 July after asking to see Malaysia Airlines' official video footage of passengers boarding the doomed flight.
The nine men, five women and two boys – aged six and four – had gone to a Malaysia Airlines office in the northern suburbs of Beijing after learning that Malaysian relatives had seen the footage.
Police then came and detained them. "The police accused us of being an organised group, and said that we had an agenda," one relative told the South China Morning Post. "All we wanted was to find our loved ones – people with whom we share the same blood."
Another relative told the newspaper: "We were also warned that more than ten people gathering together is illegal."
It also emerged this week that several families of the flight MH370 victims have been offering counselling to the relatives of those who died last week on the downed flight MH17.
Jacquita Gonzalez, the wife of MH370 in-flight supervisor Patrick Francis Gomez, told The Guardian: "No one deserves to go through what they're going through. Right now they [the MH17 bereaved] are like we were in the beginning: quiet and wanting their space. But we are here for them, we actually know what they're going through, we know this is so painful, so hard."
Flight MH370 search 'will not be diminished' by MH17 crash
23 July
The downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine will not distract from the search for flight MH370, Australia's deputy prime minister Warren Truss has said.
Concerns were raised after Angus Houston, head of the operation to find MH370, was dispatched to Ukraine to oversee the recovery of the Australian victims who died in last week's MH17 crash.
But Truss insisted that Australia's commitment to MH370 was "not in any way diminished" by MH17, which is believed to have been shot down by pro-Russian rebels.
"Clearly there have been things needed to be done urgently in relation to 17 but there is absolutely no interruption to the program for 370," he said.
However, he conceded that some meetings with Malaysian officials to agree the next stage of the search might be delayed "because they have so much on their plate".
No trace has been found of MH370, which disappeared while carrying 239 passengers from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The underwater search, which is expected to take up to a year, has been pushed back from August to September as an Australian-contracted ship Fugro Equator and a Chinese survey ship Zhu Kezhen map a 23,000 square-mile area of the Indian Ocean.
The survey of the ocean floor will allow a subsequent search using deep sea remote vehicles to avoid any hazard, reports The Australian.
Truss said there had been a "good response" for tenders for the major search operation, with a wide range of proposals in terms of cost. "It's a high profile search so it attracted, I think, some keen interest," he said.
Houston's role has been temporarily filled by Judith Zielke, a senior Australian civil servant.
"We remain fully committed to conducting a thorough undersea search of the likely impact zone in the Indian Ocean," said Truss in a press statement. "Australia owes it to the families of all of those on board MH370, the travelling public and indeed the wider world to solve this mystery."
Flight MH370: 'too little done' to prevent new disappearance
16 July
More than four months after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, industry insiders have said that not enough is being done to prevent a repeat of the disaster.
They say the absence of any firm information about what happened on board the missing Boeing 777, along with airlines' fears about the cost of new regulations and the difficulty of securing international agreement, has meant that little has changed.
"Despite promises to ensure that such an event never recurs, there are doubts about how effectively the authorities will implement any recommendations to track commercial airliners," the Financial Times reports.
Remy Jouty, head of the French air safety body the BEA, told the paper that he had encountered resistance from airlines during previous attempts to tighten up aircraft monitoring.
After Air France flight AF447 crashed en route from Rio de Janeiro in June 2009, its flight recorders were not found for almost two years.
In response, French air accident investigators recommended that all large aircraft flying over water should be tracked continuously, and would be required to broadcast their position, altitude, speed and heading on a regular basis.
Neither of those recommendations was implemented.
"While the tracking technology exists," the paper reports, "Mr Jouty pointed to 'a need for governments at the international level to reach an agreement'. Although ICAO had discussed the proposals, he said 'one aspect' of its failure to require tracking was lobbying by airlines concerned about cost – a view corroborated by a senior airline executive."
As the search for flight MH370 continues, an Australian blog suggests that a new analysis of data released by independent investigators supports the theory that systems on board the aircraft may have been sabotaged soon after it left Malaysian airspace.
"The jet, with 239 people on board, flew in a circular or complex path for 52 minutes off the northern tip of Sumatra," it states, "before then flying an apparently straight course southwards for more than four hours before running out of fuel off the Indian Ocean coast of Western Australia.
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