Oceanographer says Flight 370 could be north of search area

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — The oceanographer who led American adventurer Blaine Gibson to Madagascar where he found a potential debris field from the missing Malaysia Airlines jet said Thursday that drift modeling suggested that Flight 370 could have crashed slightly north of the current search area.

The comments come after Gibson on Tuesday handed Malaysian authorities in Kuala Lumpur three pieces of debris and personal belongings found on Madagascar beaches in June, which he suspects came from the Boeing 777 that vanished with 239 people on board during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014.

Officials from Malaysia, China and Australia will meet in Kuala Lumpur on Friday to discuss the future of the search, with fewer than 10,000 square kilometers (3,900 square miles) remaining to be scanned by ships towing sonar equipment.

If you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars to search under water and finding nothing, and it's only a plane ticket to pick up six pieces and some personal effects, you ought to just do it, he said.