Analysis of a genuine Boeing 777 wing flap has reaffirmed experts' opinion that missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is most likely to have crashed north of an abandoned search area in the Indian Ocean.
The £125 million search ended in January after a deep-sea sonar scan of 46,000 square miles south west of Australia failed to find any trace of the plane that vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8 2014, with 239 people on board.
But research has continued in an effort to refine a possible new search.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau said on Friday it obtained a wing flap of the same model as the original and studied how that part drifted in the ocean.
Previous drift modelling had used inexact replicas.
The new analysis confirmed findings released in December that the plane had probably crashed north of the searched area.
AP