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The New Zealand air force P- 3K2 Orion aircraft involved in the international search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 will return to New Zealand Thursday, Defence Minister Jonathan Coleman said Wednesday.
"Around 40 air force personnel were involved in the search over 53 days. They completed 27 flights, spent 100 hours on search, and a total of 276 hours flying. The P-3K2 searched around 1.5 million square kilometres of the southern Indian Ocean, an area about eight times the size of New Zealand," Coleman said in a statement.
"It was important that New Zealand played our part alongside our international partners in the unprecedented search effort for MH370. The air force's upgraded P-3K2 Orion, with state of the art sensors, was an ideal option for search missions like this," he said.
The total cost of the search to the New Zealand Defence Force was estimated at 1.2 million NZ dollars (1.03 million U.S. dollars) , he said.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Monday that the hunt for missing flight MH370 entered a new phase with seabed search to be expanded to a much larger area.
Abbott said at a press conference after U.S. submarine drone Bluefin-21 completed a sea floor search of a focused area in the southern Indian Ocean and found no contacts of interest.
The focused area was defined as a circle of 10 km radius around the spot where the second suspicious signal of aircraft black boxes was heard on April 8.
Abbott said it is highly unlikely to find any aircraft wreckage on the ocean surface at this stage, indicating the visual search currently conducted by airplanes and vessels may be called off.
"I am now required to say to you that it is highly unlikely, at this stage, that we will find any aircraft debris on the ocean surface. By this stage52 days into the searchmost material would have become water logged and sunk. With the distances involved, all of the aircraft are operating at close to the limit of sensible and safe operation," he said.
"Therefore we are moving from the current phase to a phase which is focused on searching the ocean floor over a much larger area."
Fifty-two days have passed since the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 with 239 people on board disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, but nothing related to the plane has been found.
