BBC Online :
Malaysia will not give up on the search for missing flight MH370, its prime minister said as he visited the search hub in Perth.
Prime Minister Najib Razak’s comments came at a joint news conference with Australian leader Tony Abbott.
Najib praised the search effort, saying the co-operation amid “great tragedy” had “given us all heart”.
The Malaysia Airlines plane disappeared on 8 March en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. It was carrying 239 people. Planes and ships have been scouring the southern Indian Ocean, where the jet is believed to have crashed. The focus of the search is a 221,000 sq km (85,000 sq mile) area 1,500km (932 miles) west of Perth.
Royal Australian Air Force P-3C Orion aircraft on the tarmac of RAAF Base Pearce near Perth. 2 April 2014
Najib met search crews at Pearce RAAF base near Perth on Thursday morning, before their planes left for the day, and then later held talks with Abbott. The sea bed in this area is like an underwater Alps, according to oceanographers. In some places it’s 4.5km deep with 2.5km high mountains – the kind of terrain that hides its secrets.
It’s easy to look at all this hi-tech hardware arriving on the scene and to think that it’s bound to find something soon. The “towed pinger locator”, which is a super-microphone basically, will be listening out for “pings” from the black boxes. There’s a Royal Navy nuclear submarine there too, listening out.
But they had the same kit when they searched for Air France 447, the airliner that crashed into the Atlantic five years ago. They even searched in the right place, but still they didn’t hear anything.
