Debris that washed ashore in Australia and was initially suspected of coming from the lost Malaysian plane likely did not come from the jet, officials said Wednesday.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau was scrutinizing photos of an object that had washed ashore 6 miles east of Augusta in Western Australia state.
But Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the safety bureau, said an analysis of the material — which appeared to be sheet metal with rivets — suggested it was not from Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
“We do not consider this likely to be of use to our search for MH370,” Dolan said. “At this stage, we are not getting excited.”
Dolan said the analysis of the material would likely be completed overnight and a formal statement issued Thursday. Augusta is near Australia’s southwestern tip, about 190 miles from Perth, where the search has been headquartered.
Meanwhile, Australia’s prime minister said Wednesday that failure to find any clue in the most likely crash site of the lost jet would not spell the end of the search, as officials planned to bring in more powerful sonar equipment that can hunt deeper beneath the Indian Ocean.
“We owe it to the families of the 239 people on board, we owe it to the hundreds of millions — indeed billions — of people who travel by air to try to get to the bottom of this. The only way we can get to the bottom of this is to keep searching the probable impact zone until we find something or until we have searched it as thoroughly as human ingenuity allows at this time,” Prime Minister Tony Abbott said.
The search coordination center said a robotic submarine, the US Navy’s Bluefin 21, had scanned more than 80 percent of the 120-square-mile seabed search zone off Australia’s west coast, creating a three-dimensional sonar map of the ocean floor.
Nothing of interest had been found.
Sonar equipment picked up a signal on April 8 consistent with a plane’s black boxes, but the batteries powering those signals are now believed dead.
Defense Minister David Johnston said Australia was consulting with Malaysia, China and the United States on the next phase of the search for the plane, which disappeared March 8.