Chief coordinator of the Joint Agency Coordination Center, retired Chief Air Marshall Angus Houston gestures as he speaks during a press conference in Perth, Australia. (Photo: Rob Griffith, AP) 
 
 BEIJING – After 53 days of fruitless, government-led efforts on sea and by air, the team searching for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 will identify and deploy more sophisticated underwater equipment from private companies, officials from Australia, Malaysia and China agreed Monday. 
 
 Announcing a new phase in the multinational hunt, Australia's Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said the search of the ocean floor will be intensified and expanded over a much larger area than has been covered to date. 
 
 The plane disappeared March 8 with 239 passengers and crew en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The majority of passengers were Chinese citizens. Using satellite data, investigators concluded the plane ended in the southern Indian Ocean, thousands of miles off route, but no wreckage has been found. 
 
 The U.S. Navy's Bluefin-21, an unmanned submarine fitted with sonar, will continue to scan the target area, a thousand miles off Australia's west coast, Truss told a press conference Monday in Canberra. But tenders will soon be put out for specialist vehicles that can dive deeper than Bluefin-21 and recover debris, and also for towed sonar equipment to conduct more detailed underwater mapping of sea floor that "has never been mapped", he said. 
 
 More hardware will be "in the water" in the next two months, said Truss, who promised there would be no long interruptions in the search as occurred during the two-year hunt for the black boxes of the 2009 Air France disaster. At a meeting Wednesday in Canberra, experts from the three countries will discuss what other assets are required for the search's new phase, he said.The extreme depths involved mean there are "only a handful of pieces of relevant machinery in the world," and few oceanographic vessels capable of mapping such depths, said Truss, who expects the private sector to provide most of the required equipment. Towed sonar will permit real-time sharing of information and quicker response times, unlike the Bluefin-21 which must be recovered for data download, he said. 
 
 That meeting will also perform "something of an audit" of all the information gathered to date, including the satellite data, he said. Despite the failure to locate a single piece of MH370, search coordinator Angus Houston said he still believes searchers are correct to place most weight on the satellite analysis that led them to the current search area. But he welcomed the review of all the information that took them there. 
 
 Australian navy vessel Ocean Shield is berthed near Perth on Monday as it replenishes its supplies and conducts maintenance on underwater vehicle Artemis Bluefin-21, which has been searching for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. (Photo: Greg Wood, AFP/Getty Images) 
 
 
 
 "It's very sensible to go back" to ensure "there are no flaws in that, the assumptions are right, the analysis is right, and the deductions and conclusions are right," Houston said in Canberra Monday. Compared to other plane crashes, "we've got very little to work on," admitted Malaysia's Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, who still insisted the searchers "are on the right track." All nations involved have borne their own costs to date, said Truss. Hussein doubted that private firms would need the lure of a reward to get involved. "The whole tragedy has caught the imagination of so many," he said Monday. "There's no reward big enough," said Hussein, adding that any company that found the plane would immediately become the most famous in the world. China's Transport Minister Yang Chuantang promised Monday that Beijing will continue uninterrupted and intensified efforts to search for MH370, he said after the trilateral meeting. 
 
 
 
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 As investigators prepare to concede defeat in their search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, some scientists are pondering the unthinkable: they’ve been looking in the wrong place for more than two years. 
 
 Ships scouring an almost endless expanse of southern Indian Ocean have whittled down the area to a patch little bigger than the U.S. state of Delaware. They’ve turned up nothing of the jet that disappeared March 8, 2014, en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board. 
 
 With no closure in sight, transport ministers from Malaysia, China and Australia meet Thursday in Kuala Lumpur to assess the A$180 million ($135 million) operation. There are no plans to look beyond the designated 120,000 square kilometers (46,330 square miles), the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said in an e-mail before today’s meeting. More than 90 percent of the search area has already been covered. 
 
 The absence of wreckage in the search area to date may question one of the recovery mission’s central assumptions -- that no one was in control of the plane when it ran out of fuel and spiraled sharply into the ocean, said Vaughan Clarkson, a former University of Queensland radar and tracking specialist and one of the scientists who helped recreate MH370’s flight path for the Australian government. 
 
 Rather, the fruitless hunt suggests someone glided the aircraft into the water -- beyond what would become the outer limits of the search zone, he said. Leidschendam, Netherlands-based Fugro NV is the contractor carrying out the search operations. 
 
 “Probably what we’ve discovered from this exercise is that the plane was under active control,” said Clarkson, who’s now an independent consultant. “The search area must be basically right, but perhaps it’s not quite big enough.” 
 
 The implications of a controlled glide into the ocean are vast. Even with no fuel, a pilot could have guided MH370 for a further 230 kilometers, the ATSB said in a December 2015 report. That’s more than enough to reach Philadelphia from New York. It could mean combing an area almost as big as California for the best part of a decade. 
 
 For a related story, click: Missing Malaysia Jet Weeks Away From Keeping Secrets Forever 
 
 If the assumptions were accurate, there’s little chance the wreck could remain hidden in the search area, Australian government scientists said in a report last year. At depths of up to 6 kilometers (4 miles), the underwater search has been so thorough that not even lumps of coal on the seabed have escaped detection, the ATSB said in an e-mail to Bloomberg News this week. 
 
 Recreating Flight 370’s last moments has always been one of the biggest challenges. Earlier satellite data from the plane suggested it cruised south over the Indian Ocean for about six hours. And a final automated electronic message probably coincided with fuel exhaustion, scientists concluded. But after that, scientists had little help other than flight simulations and data from old plane crashes. 
 
 Air-traffic controllers lost contact with MH370 less than an hour after takeoff as it approached Vietnam. Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak has said the plane was deliberately steered off course. 
 
 Step Back 
 
 After an effective but fruitless search of this nature, it may be time to step back and reevaluate, Larry Stone, the chief scientist at Reston, Virginia-based consultant Metron Inc. who has tracked missing aircraft and ships for half a century, said in an e-mail. 
 
 “You have effectively exhausted the information on which your search was planned,” said Stone, who mapped out the resting place of Air France Flight 447, which was recovered two years after plummeting into the Atlantic Ocean with 228 people aboard in 2009. 
 
 One option is to revise the assumptions on which the search is based and question whether neglected information should be included in a new hunt, Stone said in an email. 
 
 Families of the passengers are already petitioning for the search to be extended. 
 
 Wild winter weather and waves more than five stories high have delayed the mission in the Indian Ocean. An original mid-year completion target has been pushed back by up to eight weeks, investigators said in a July 13 update. 
 
 The first debris from MH370 was found on Reunion Island in July 2015. Four other pieces that turned up on Africa’s eastern seaboard and in Mauritius almost certainly belong to the doomed jet, according to investigators. 
 
 Officials are also analyzing a possible wing flap found late June on Pemba Island off the coast of Tanzania. Investigators haven’t yet confirmed that the debris belongs to MH370. 
 
 Ultimately, the decision by ministers in Kuala Lumpur may boil down to time and money. 
 
 “My own feeling is that it would be a shame if we let the search drop,” said tracking specialist Clarkson. “But I appreciate that a hard-headed decision needs to be made at some point.”
– The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is growing, officials say, as searchers prepare to map a wide swath of the ocean floor in a new phase of the effort. "We know very clearly the area of the follow-up search will be even broader, with more difficulties and tougher tasks," says China's transport minister. "For the next stage involving sonar and other autonomous vehicles, potentially at very great depths, we need to have an understanding of the ocean floor," says Australia's deputy PM, per CNN. The new search area has "never been mapped." Officials will be looking for help from private companies; they doubt firms will need much financial incentive, USA Today reports. "There's no reward big enough," says Malaysia's acting transport minister, but if a company can find the plane, it will win instant worldwide fame, he notes. Search leaders are hoping a single firm will take on the task to avoid continued coordination problems, the Wall Street Journal notes. Officials also plan to go through all existing data once again. "It's very sensible to go back" to be certain "there are no flaws in that—the assumptions are right, the analysis is right, and the deductions and conclusions are right," says search coordinator Angus Houston.