Aviation experts and airline pilots on Friday urged the Australian government to continue the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, even if Malaysian authorities are satisfied to call off the hunt.
As the Australian-led ocean search for the missing Boeing 777 jet is expected to wrap up in coming weeks, aviation experts and pilots alike are appealing to the Australian government not to let Malaysia "get away."
President of the Australian Federation of Air Pilots David Booth said that in the wake of new evidence from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) - in which they said the plane could be further north of the current search zone - the search must continue.
He told News Corp. that "the need to recover the wreckage" of any missing plane was vital "to determine the cause of every accident."
"This means funding a search of all feasible areas," Booth said Friday.
Meanwhile, former EasyJet pilot Mike Keane told News Corp. it was peculiar that the Malaysian authorities were happy to abandon the search for one of its own airplanes.
"If the Malaysians try to call this off, you would have to ask the reason why; any major airline would want to find out what happened to its aircraft," Keane said.
"They are ducking litigation and embarrassment, loss of face... they have a vested interest, to my mind, not to find the aircraft."
MH370 was a scheduled passenger flight from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing. It disappeared somewhere over the Indian Ocean on March 8, 2014 with 239 passengers and crew on board.
