The British satellite company that provided the main clues in the hunt for the missing Malaysian airliner says search teams have yet to go to the area where the crash site is most likely to be.
Inmarsat was receiving signals from Flight MH370 before it disappeared on 8 March; 239 people were on the plane which disappeared about an hour after it left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing.
A visitor adds a message for missing passengers at an International Search and Rescue Conference and Exhibition in Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday. Photo: AFP
Using satellite data, officials have concluded that the Boeing 777 somehow ended its journey in the Indian Ocean, north-west of the Australian city of Perth. But no trace of the plane has been found, nor any reason for its disappearance.
It's the brief hourly electronic connections between Flight MH370 and an Inmarsat spacecraft that are driving this investigation, the BBC reports.
Inmarsat scientists could tell from the timing and frequencies of signals that the plane had to have come down in the southern Indian Ocean and an Australian naval vessel was sent to investigate its best estimate.
But the telecommunications company has told the BBC that the ship never reached the most likely crash zone, because it picked up detections it thought was coming from the jet's submerged flight recorders.
The hunt for the lost jet is currently taking a short break while ships map the Indian Ocean floor.
