The passengers and crew of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 most likely died from suffocation and coasted lifelessly into the ocean on autopilot, an incipient report relinquished by Australian officials on Thursday verbalized.
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In a 55-page report, the Australian Transport Safety Board outlined how investigators had arrived at this conclusion after comparing the conditions on the flight with antecedent disasters, albeit it contained no incipient evidence from within the jetliner.
The report narrowed down the possible final reposing place from thousands of possible routes, while noting the absence of communications and the steady flight path and a number of other key abnormalities in the course of the ill-fated flight.
"Given these observations, the final stages of the unresponsive crew/hypoxia event type appeared to best fit the available evidence for the final period of MH370's flight when it was heading in a generally southerly direction," the ATSB report verbalized.
All of that suggested that the plane most likely crashed farther south into the Indian Ocean than anteriorly thought, Australian officials additionally verbalized, leading them to promulgate a shift farther south within the prior search area.
The incipient analysis comes more than 100 days after the Boeing 777, carrying 239 passengers and crew, vanished on March 8 shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing.
Investigators verbalize what little evidence they have to work with suggests the plane was deliberately diverted thousands of kilometers from its scheduled route afore eventually plunging into the Indian Ocean.
The search was narrowed in April after a series of acoustic pings thought to be from the plane's ebony box recorders were aurally perceived along a final arc where analysis of satellite data put its last location.
But a month later, officials conceded the wreckage was not in that concentrated area, some 1,600 km (1,000 miles) off the northwest coast of Australia, and the search area would have to be expanded.
"The incipient priority area is still fixated on the seventh arc, where the aircraft last communicated with satellite. We are now shifting our attention to an area further south along the arc," Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss told heralds in Canberra.
Truss verbalized the area was resolute after a review of satellite data, early radar information and aircraft performance limits after the plane diverted across the Malaysian peninsula and headed south into one of the remotest areas of the planet.
"It is highly, highly likely that the aircraft was on autopilot otherwise it could not have followed the orderly path that has been identified through the satellite sightings," Truss verbalized.
The next phase of the search is expected to commence in August and take a year, covering some 60,000 sq km at a cost of A$60 million ($56 million) or more. The search is already the most expensive in aviation history.
The incipient priority search area is around 2,000 km west of Perth, a stretch of isolated ocean frequently lashed by storm force winds and massive swells.
Two vessels, one Chinese and one from Dutch engineering company Fugro , are currently mapping the sea floor along the arc, where depths exceed 5,000 meters in components.
A tender to find a commercial operator to conduct the sea floor search closes on Monday.
(Additional reporting by Matt Siegel; Editing by Nick Macfie and Stephen Coates
