Follow Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 Search Live Online As Hunt For Missing Plane Gets Underway

The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 got back underway on Sunday, and experts cautioned that the searchers could be in for a long haul — possibly a year or more — before any sign of the missing plane turns up.

But despite bizarre internet speculation that Flight 370 is not in the Indian Ocean at all, but somewhere else, possibly even on land, Malaysia Airlines watchers can follow the search for the Boeing 777-200 with live online updates from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, the agency now in charge of the daunting search.

To receive regular updates on the painstaking underwater search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, bookmark this link at the ATSB website. But, as the ATSB itself warns, don’t expect a lot of information or major breakthroughs anytime soon.

“This operational report has been developed to provide regular updates on the progress of the search effort for MH370,” the ATSB writes on the site. “Our work will continue to be thorough and methodical, so sometimes weekly progress may seem slow. Please be assured that work is continuing and is aimed at finding MH370 as quickly as possible.”

That hasn’t stopped the conspiracy theories, however, and not just from anonymous internet message board enthusiasts. As The Inquisitr has reported, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has suggested that Flight 370 may not have crashed into the water at all, but might be “effectively hidden, perhaps in Northern Pakistan, like Bin Laden.”

While no credible expert takes that possibility seriously, with satellite data placing the last known position of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 well out over the remote reaches of the Indian Ocean, experts still disagree over the exact location where the plane went down.

The ATSB experts have narrowed the search area down to a 23,000-mile strip more than 1,000 miles off the coast of Perth. But an independent expert group contends the plane would have gone into a tight downward spiral that would have brought it down several hundred miles from where the current search is focused.

But the authors of a recent book, Goodnight Malaysian 370, concluded that the Malaysia Airlines plane did not descend in a spiral, but was deliberately landed on the water by the allegedly mentally unstable pilot. In that case, the plane would have sunk to the bottom in one piece, in a location well short of where the searchers are now combing the sea floor.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared on March 8 while on what was supposed to be a routine, three-hour hop from Kuala Lumpur to the Chinese capital of Beijing. There were 239 people on board the plane.