Australian officials say they are confident missing flight MH370 was flying on autopilot when it disappeared. The Malaysia Airlines plane vanished on March 8th, carrying 239 passengers while travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The search area in the hunt for the missing jet has shifted south of the most recent suspected crash site in a remote stretch of Indian Ocean, where a remote underwater drone had been scouring 330 square miles of seabed.
Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, said "Certainly for its path across the Indian Ocean, we are confident that the aircraft was operating on autopilot until it ran out of fuel".
The new search zone of up to 24,000 square miles is in the southern corridor and is based on where the aircraft last communicated with an Inmarsat satellite.
A survey will be carried out by two surface vessels to map the ocean floor of the area, which will take three months. A comprehensive underwater search will then start in August and take up to 12 months to complete.
Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said the new search area is based on fresh analysis of existing satellite data.
Earlier this month, the relatives of missing passengers announced they were seeking to raise some €3.6 million to offer as a reward to any "whistleblower" who can offer information leading to the discovery of the lost plane.
Many of the families believe there has been a cover-up and are hoping the money will tempt someone to come forward, such as an insider from the world of commercial aviation or the military.
The Boeing 777 is believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, but an extensive search has turned up no sign of wreckage so far, leaving families increasingly frustrated.
The hunt suffered a major setback after it emerged acoustic pings thought to have come from the plane's two flight recorders were not from the aircraft after all, leaving search teams scouring the wrong area.
It is thought the sounds came from a search boat or the ping detector itself, ruling out the area originally thought to be where the plane was located.
