Officials overseeing the hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 said the search will be completed by April 2015. But one expert has said that it could take “months to years” to locate the wreckage or black boxes from the plane.
The searchers have remained optimistic in finding the plane, which disappeared March 8 with 239 people on board, to give families of the passengers a sense of relief.
Judith Zielke, the head of the coordinated efforts in finding the plane’s wreckage, said the search is slow and tedious. Searchers are moving around two miles per hour amid bad weather conditions at times, reported the Rakyat Post in Malaysia.
“It will take until April next year to finish searching the entire area. I pray every day that today is the day,” Zielke was quoted as saying in the report, published Tuesday.
A coastal oceanography expert, Charitha Pattiaratchi, told the paper that it’s expected to take this long, per the newspaper.
He said it took about two years to find the black boxes from the Air France flight that crashed in 2009 in the Atlantic Ocean.
