The missing Malaysia Airlines plane isn’t in the area thought to be its most likely resting point, lead investigators said Thursday.
The 300-mile zone in the Indian Ocean that search crews have been scouring for weeks can now be ruled out, the agency in charge of the search said.
“The search in the vicinity of the acoustic detections can now be considered complete and, in its professional judgment, the area can now be discounted as the final resting place of MH370,” a spokesman for Australia’s Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre said.
Investigators have been zeroing in on the zone, off the coast of Australia, since early April after pings — at first thought to be from the aircraft’s black box — were detected.
Critics took to Twitter on Thursday to blast the search effort as a waste of time.
But Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss claimed search crews aren’t far off.
“We are still very confident that the resting place of the aircraft is in the southern ocean and along the seventh ping line,” Truss said Thursday.
He added, “We concentrated the search in this area because the pings and the information we received was the best information we had available at the time. And that is all you can do in circumstances like this … follow the very best leads.”
The pings detected in the area are no longer believed to have come from the plane’s black box, a US Navy official told CNN on Wednesday.
Authorities wrapped up the first phase of the search without finding any wreckage from the aircraft, which vanished March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.