There is no time limit on resolving the “extraordinary mystery” of the missing Malaysian jet, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Monday, even as the latest leads on possible plane debris turned out to be false alarms.
Bad weather conditions on Monday forced the Australia-led search team to suspend operations for locating the debris of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in the Indian Ocean. The search had been intensified on Monday with 10 aircraft and 10 ships combing 254,000 sq km area. Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) said the orange objects spotted by a plane have turned out to be nothing more than fishing equipment.
The objects had been analysed and spokesman Jesse Platts said “they have nothing to do with the missing flight.” “We can keep searching for quite some time to come and we will keep searching for quite some time to come. I’m certainly not putting a time limit on it,” Abbott told reporters at the Perth’s Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) base Pearce.
“This is an extraordinarily difficult exercise...We are searching a vast area of ocean and we are working on quite limited information,” he said. Appreciating the contribution of those who were involved in the search operation, Abbott said the “best brains in the world” are on the task but until any wreckage was found, authorities will have to keep relying on “guesstimates”.
“All of the technological mastery that we have is being applied. So if this mystery is solvable, we will solve it,” he said, adding “But I don’t want to underestimate just how difficult it is”.
“We owe it to the families, we owe it to everyone that travels by air, we owe it to the anxious Governments of the countries who had people on that aircraft. We owe it to the wider world which has been transfixed by this mystery for three weeks now,” Abbott said.