Australia leads the southern search

Australia, Malaysia and China agreed that Australia would lead the southern Indian Ocean search through the ATSB and JACC. Surface assets scanned tens of thousands of square kilometres of empty ocean. In April 2014 towed pinger locator detections briefly raised hopes; follow-up by Bluefin-21 AUV found no wreckage, and the detections are not considered MH370. The underwater phase that followed (October 2014 – January 2017) covered about 120,000 km² of seabed along the 7th arc.