No one was at controls of Flight 370, investigators say

A fresh analysis of the final moments of the doomed Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 suggests no one was controlling the plane when it plunged into the ocean, according to a report released by investigators on Wednesday, as experts hunting for the aircraft gathered in Australia's capital Sydney to discuss the fading search effort.

A technical report released by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which leads the search, seems to support the theory investigators have long favoured: that no one was at the controls of the Boeing 777 when it ran out of fuel and dove at high speed into a remote patch of the Indian Ocean off western Australia in 2014.

In recent months, critics have increasingly been pushing the alternate theory that someone was still controlling the plane at the end of its flight. If that was the case, the aircraft could have glided much farther, tripling in size the possible area where it could have crashed and further complicating the already hugely complex effort to find it.

But Wednesday's report shows that the latest analysis of satellite data is consistent with the plane being in a "high and increasing rate of descent" in its final moments. The report also said that an analysis of a wing flap that was washed ashore in Tanzania indicates the flap was likely not deployed when it broke off the plane. A pilot would typically extend the flaps during a controlled ditching.

Peter Foley, the bureau's director of Flight 370 search operations, has previously said that if the flap was not deployed, it would almost certainly rule out the theory that the plane entered the water in a controlled ditch and would effectively validate that searchers are looking in the right place for the wreckage.

"(It) means the aircraft wasn't configured for a landing or a ditching; you can draw your own conclusions as to whether that means someone was in control," Foley told reporters in Canberra on Wednesday. "You can never be 100 per cent. We are very reluctant to express absolute certainty."

The report's release comes as a team of international and Australian experts begin a three-day summit in Canberra to re-examine all the data associated with the hunt for the plane, which vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 8 March 2014 with 239 people on board.