Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, center, addresses the media with former Defense Force Chief Angus Houston, left, and Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss at RAAF base Pearce on Monday, March 31, 2014, in Bullsbrook, near Perth, Australia. Abbott said the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is “an extraordinarily difficult exercise” but that it will go on as long as possible.PERTH, Australia – The weekslong search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is “an extraordinarily difficult exercise” but it will go on as long as possible, Australia’s prime minister said Monday.
Tony Abbott told reporters in Perth, the base for the search, that although no debris has been found in the southern Indian Ocean that can be linked to the plane, searchers are “well, well short” of any point where they would scale the hunt back.
The Boeing 777 disappeared March 8 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard, and after experts shifted through radar and satellite data, they gradually moved the hunt from seas off of Vietnam, to areas west of Malaysia and Indonesia, and then to several areas west of Australia.
“This is an extraordinarily difficult exercise …. we are searching a vast area of ocean and we are working on quite limited information,” Abbott said, adding that the best brains in the world and all the technological mastery is being applied to the task.
“If this mystery is solvable, we will solve it,” he said.