‘Mystery almost inconceivable’:

Asia

A report on the almost three-year search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 said Tuesday the continuing mystery over the fate of the plane and the 239 people on board is “almost inconceivable.”

But the Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s final report on the search, which was abandoned in January, concedes that authorities are no closer to knowing the reasons for the plane’s disappearance, or its exact location. This is despite last year’s narrowing down of its most likely resting place to a 25,000-square kilometer (9,650-square mile) patch of the southern Indian Ocean.

The Boeing 777 carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew disappeared soon into its flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014.

A 52-day surface search covered an area of several million square kilometers (square miles) in the Indian Ocean west of Australia, before an underwater search mapped 710,000 square kilometers (274,000 square miles) of seabed at depths of up to 6,000 meters (20,000 feet). They were the largest aviation searches of their kind in history, the bureau said.

Despite other methods such as studying satellite imagery and investigating ocean drifts after debris from the plane washed ashore on islands in the eastern Indian Ocean and the east coast of Africa, the 1,046-day search was called off by the governments of Malaysia, China and Australia on Jan. 17.

“The reasons for the loss of MH370 cannot be established with certainty until the aircraft is found,” the bureau, which coordinated the search, said in the 440page report.

“It is almost inconceivable and certainly societally unacceptable in the modern avia-