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. 
 
 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1kN5VT7 ||||| Officials announce that the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 will focus on a larger area of the Indian Ocean floor as the chance of finding floating debris further diminishes. (Reuters) 
 
 Officials announce that the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 will focus on a larger area of the Indian Ocean floor as the chance of finding floating debris further diminishes. (Reuters) 
 
 The sputtering search for a missing Malaysian airliner will be expanded to include a much larger swath of the Indian Ocean floor, Australia’s prime minister said Monday, signaling a daunting new phase in the bid to find the aircraft’s wreckage. 
 
 The next stage in the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 will focus entirely on underwater exploration, forgoing the use of airplanes and vessels to spot debris on the surface. By now, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said, any wreckage is likely to have “become waterlogged and sunk.” 
 
 A broader underwater search — requiring unmanned miniature submarines trawling the ocean depths at walking speed — casts doubt on the chances of ever unraveling the confounding aviation mystery. It also drastically increases the cost of the search and expands the time frame. The underwater hunt was previously focused on a small area that required two weeks to examine. The expanded area is about 22,000 square miles, or about the size of West Virginia, and could require six to eight months to fully scour. 
 
 More than seven weeks into the search, the countries involved, including the United States, have been bearing their own costs. But Abbott said Monday that Australia will seek contributions from other nations while also engaging private companies, selected with help from the Malaysian government. 
 
 “We will do everything we humanly can, everything we reasonably can, to solve this mystery,” he said at a news conference in Canberra, the Australian capital. 
 
 No debris has been found from the airplane, which disappeared March 8 with 239 passengers and crew members aboard en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Its likely endpoint — the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia — was determined only from analysis of signals the plane transmitted to a satellite while still airborne. Based on information about the airliner’s possible coordinates and time aloft, investigators have theorized that Flight 370 ran out of fuel more than seven hours after taking off from Kuala Lumpur. 
 
 Hopes for finding the plane were bolstered earlier this month, when U.S. Navy equipment picked up deep-sea “pings” that appeared to be black-box transmissions from the aircraft. The flight-data recorder and cockpit voice recorder are equipped with batteries to power emergency beacons after a crash. On April 9, Angus Houston, chief of the multinational search, said he hoped to find the first physical evidence of the plane “in a matter of days.” 
 
 Instead, the search hit a wall. Black-box batteries have a guaranteed shelf life of 30 days, and the U.S. Navy equipment stopped picking up the signals. Then, a torpedo-like robotic submarine known as a Bluefin-21 was sent to the 2.8-mile depths. In a series of deep-dive missions, it created a sonar map of the area that search teams thought was Flight 370’s likely location. The Bluefin-21 found nothing of interest. 
 
 Abbott said officials will bring in additional equipment for the next phase of the search. But the process of organizing contracts with private companies could take several weeks. In the meantime, the Bluefin-21 will continue to scour the ocean floor. 
 
 Abbott said he was “baffled and disappointed” about the failure to find underwater wreckage based on the apparent black-box detections. He said those pings remained “the best information that we’ve got.” 
 
 View Graphic Compare the depth of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 to other milestone depths and distances. 
 
 “It may turn out to be a false lead,” Abbott said, “but, nevertheless, it’s the best lead we’ve got.”
– 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.