The underwater hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet will be expanded to include a massive swath of ocean floor that may take up to eight months to thoroughly search, Australia's prime minister said Monday, according to AP. The U.S. Navy's Bluefin 21 robotic submarine has spent weeks scouring the initial search area for Flight 370 in the remote Indian Ocean far off Australia's west coast, but has found no trace of the missing aircraft, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said. Officials are now looking to bring in new equipment that can search a larger patch of seabed for the plane, Abbott said. "It is highly unlikely at this stage that we will find any aircraft debris on the ocean surface. By this stage, 52 days into the search, most material would have become waterlogged and sunk," Abbott told reporters. "Therefore, we are moving from the current phase to a phase which is focused on searching the ocean floor over a much larger area." An aerial search for the plane that has dragged on for six weeks will officially end on Monday, the search coordination center later confirmed. Radar and satellite data show the jet carrying 239 passengers and crew veered far off course on March 8 for unknown reasons during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing.
