“You can draw your own conclusions,” the ATSB’s head of MH370 search operations Peter Foley told reporters, adding that the new findings showed “we’re looking for an aircraft that’s actually quite close to the seventh arc.”

The search zone—defined under the “most likely” scenario that no one was at the controls as the jet ran out of fuel—is a thin, long stretch of water within the so-called seventh arc, where the plane was calculated to have emitted a final satellite “handshake” showing its location. “It was probably in a non-extended position which means the aircraft wasn’t configured for a landing or a ditching,” said Foley, referring to the practice of extending wing flaps to allow an aircraft to travel safely at slower speeds in preparation for a landing. “This report contains important new information on what we believe happened at the end of MH370’s flight,” Australia’s Transport Minister Darren Chester said at the start of a three-day meeting in Canberra where experts will plan the final stages of the search. The report's release comes as a team of international and Australian experts begin a three-day summit in Canberra to re-examine all the data associated with the hunt for the plane, which vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board. Experts have been preemptively trying to define a new search area by studying where in the Indian Ocean the first piece of wreckage recovered from the plane — a wing flap known as a flaperon — most likely drifted from after the plane crashed. "They are reviewing all the available data and associated analysis, assumptions and modeling undertaken to inform the definition of the search area," Australian Transport Safety Bureau communication officer Dan O'Malley told CNN on Wednesday. Ongoing drift analysis also suggested the search focused on the right place, the ATSB said, noting it was “unlikely debris originated south of the current search area.
New analysis by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau suggests that no-one was controlling Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 as it plunged into the southern Indian Ocean in 2014.