The follow-up operation, which will commence when the weather in the southern Hemisphere becomes conducive, is a welcome development to the families of the victims of the ill-fated flight.
In February, Chief Commissioner of the ATSB Martin Dolan declared that, with three quarters of the search completed, he is optimistic that MH370 will be found.
MH370 has been carrying 239 passengers including crew members when it vanished on March 8, 2014 during an overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
A couple of years later, the search has gone nowhere.
The absence of new leads will compel the Australian, Malaysian and Chinese authorities to end its $130-million operation of high-tech scanning at designated swaths of sea floor in the Indian Ocean.
The unprecedented hunt for wreckage from the flight is supposed to end in July but without positive developments along the way, it is likely that the quest and investigation will continue.
Dan O'Malley, ATSB spokesman, has pointed out that some targets, which were previously missed while scouring the ocean bed, have already been identified.
The projected marks are scattered across the greater search area. In line with this, doubts and suspicions have surfaced that investigators are searching on the wrong direction due to basing their calculations on the plane's location which, in a sense, borders on a hit-and-miss approach.
Some experts are challenging the examiners' theory that the plane flew unmanned during its final moments. It is suspected instead that the aircraft may have glided with someone at the helm.
Meanwhile, the Chinese-owned search trawler Dong Hai Jiu 101, which can be controlled remotely, will be joining the Maryland-based Phoenix International in scouring the area. So far, around 110,000 kilometers of the targeted sea region have already been explored.
