Australia's deputy prime minister has reportedly said that the search for missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 "cannot go on forever," adding that discussions are already underway between Australia, China and Malaysia to decide whether to call off the search operation within weeks.
The search team has not found any trace of the Boeing 777 aircraft, which disappeared a year ago this week along with 239 passengers and crew members. It has become one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history, Stuff.co.nz reported.
The search of a rugged 60,000 sq km patch of sea bed some 1,600 km west of the Australian city of Perth, which experts believed was the plane's crash site, is expected to be finished by May.
Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said that a decision on whether to continue the search operation into the vast 1.1 million square km area around the primary search zone would have to be taken well before May, if nothing has been found.
Truss added that discussions were going on about what to do in the event, including the possibility that the operation might be called off.
While admitting that many of the families of the victims will not have "closure" unless the missing aircraft had been located and victims' remains have been recovered, Truss said that they cannot keep searching forever but will do everything that's "reasonably possible to locate the aircraft."
The aircraft vanished from the radar shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, bound for Beijing, early on March 8, 2014. Investigators believe that it had flown thousands of miles off course before crashing into the Indian Ocean.