Looking in the wrong place?
Peter Waring, 41, became a member of the Malaysia Airlines MH370 search team six months after the plane disappeared from radar with 239 people on board on March 8, 2014.
Although numerous searches have been conducted since then, all focusing on an area in the southern Indian Ocean, the missing plane has never been found.
The disappearance of MH370 remains one of the greatest aviation mysteries of all time and remains unsolved.
MH370 disappears from radar with 239 people on board
The official report found the plane made a dramatic U-turn less than an hour into pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah's planned flight before crashing into the Indian Ocean, near an area known as the Seventh Arc, according to The Sun.
Mr Waring, a seabed surveying and mapping expert, was brought in to help scan a 92km wide by 644km long search area pinpointed from satellite data and flight simulations.
He became a member of the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC), an Australian government agency set up with the Chinese and Malaysian governments in March 2014 to manage efforts to locate the missing jetliner.
The search involved several phases, an acoustic search to detect any signals from the plane's underwater locator beacon, an ultrasound search of the seabed, and a bathymetric survey to map the depth of the seabed.
An area of ocean dubbed "Broken Ridge" has become the focus of the search - notorious for its complex underwater terrain.
MH370 search ship Fugro Equator returns to Australia after 6 months at sea
Mr Waring joined the search in September 2014, spending 12 months coordinating from Canberra and reporting back to officials on the underwater search operations.
Sonar teams on three ships, the Go Phoenix, Fugro Discovery and Fugro Equator, towed sensors - scanning the seabed in the hope of identifying debris.
However, the former Australian naval officer said they quickly realised they were looking in the wrong place for MH370.
The area had been scanned so precisely that search teams were unlikely to miss the wreckage beneath the waves, he told The Sun.
The search was so deep that the team even discovered the remains of two shipwrecks in Victoria - but no debris from the missing passenger flight was found.
Although some experts theorize that the plane crashed in the 7th Arc, he still believes in expert and Boeing 777 pilot Simon Hardy.
Based on his calculations, Hardy suggests that the "suicidal" Zaharie Ahmad Shah flew the plane much further into the Indian Ocean than previously thought.
He believes Shah wanted to hide the plane forever in a controlled trench to limit debris flow – more than 80km southwest of the previous search area.
The plane may have crashed in the Geelvinck Fracture Zone, a trench about 805m deep and 11km below the seabed that would be very difficult to find.
Since the plane went missing, the Malaysian government has faced enormous pressure from the victims' families to find the plane and end their long nightmare.
The search continues
In the years since the tragic events of March 8, many experts have attempted to determine the final resting place of the passenger plane.
After an initial search in the South China Sea, rescue efforts shifted to another location when communications and satellite data suggested the plane may have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.
From March 18 to April 28, 19 ships and 345 search missions conducted by military aircraft took part in the rescue operation covering an area of 4.7 million square kilometers.
In January 2017, the official search for MH370 was suspended without answers after proving to be one of the most expensive searches in aviation history.
The final report revealed that the search had cost £122 million ($228 million). In January 2018, the US private company Ocean Infinity resumed its search in an area of 25,000 square kilometres before expanding the perimeter to 111,000 square kilometres, using eight autonomous underwater vehicles.
Simulated image of MH370 crashing into the sea
By June, the contract with the Malaysian government ended and the mission to find any debris from MH370 was unsuccessful.
In March 2022, Ocean Infinity said it was committed to continuing the search with its new Armada vessel, pending approval from the Malaysian government. The company claimed to have new evidence that it believed could help locate the missing plane on the seabed.
Last September, pilot Patrick Blelly and aerospace expert Jean-Luc Marchand claimed a new area could find MH370 in just 10 days.
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