(April 20): A Malaysian marine expert wants the Australian authorities to prove their “seventh arc” theory for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 by sending a plane along the assumed flight path.

Mohamed Shareef, 45, told International Business Times UK that the theory, which was calculated according to Inmarsat radio signals or “handshakes”, needed to be reviewed as it was “not 100% accurate”.

“The flights that they have taken to form the so-called seventh arc were continuously logged into the system and it was going along the route and they took their readings for comparison, which is understood.

“But the case of MH370, it is different. It was not continually logged into the system and no one knows whether it maintained its altitude,” he was quoted as saying.

Shareef said that the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) should send a plane along the calculated flight path to “prove to the world” the accuracy of the route.

“Based on those little signals, what I'm arguing is that if you have calculated something, why not send a real plane on the assumed calculated flight path to check you are right, which would allow us to come closer to the truth,” he said in the IBT report.

Shareef is not the first to question the accuracy of the seventh arc theory. Last month, military aviation technology expert Andre Milne said there was no corroborative evidence for the theory, which states that the missing Boeing 777 is located in the southern Indian Ocean.

It was “a criminal act of fabrication of evidence” to continue insisting that the plane had crashed in the existing search area, Milne had said.

More than a year after flight MH370 disappeared from radar, not a trace of debris has been found despite the largest and most expensive search operations in aviation history.

On April 16, the three governments involved in the search – Malaysia, Australia and China – said the search zone would be expanded to cover another 60,000 sq km if current operations failed to produce results.

“Upon completion of the additional 60,000 sq km, all high probability search areas would have been covered,” the Australian Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) said in a statement.

Flight MH370 went missing on March 8, 2014, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. It was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members, all of whom are presumed dead after the Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation announced in January that the flight was an accident based on international aviation rules. – The Malaysian Insider