The Daily Beast has learned that in the final days of the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the search vessel scouring the depths of the Indian Ocean has suddenly moved at high speed to a new location more than 200 miles north. The site is close to an area that experts have recently identified as far more likely to contain the remains of the Boeing 777.
The Dutch-owned vessel Equator is using an autonomous underwater vehicle in a pattern of maneuvers near the seabed similar to that used on two previous occasions when significantly large objects were identified. Both of these turned out to be shipwrecks.
This change of mission was detected by Dr. Richard Cole, of University College, London, who has been following the search operation for many months via satellite tracking.
It comes after the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, directing the search operations, admitted that the area of 46,000 square miles that has been searched for 27 months is unlikely to contain the remains of the jet.
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