Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 370, which went missing in March 2014 and the search for which was called off in January this year, might be located “north” of the former search zone in the Indian Ocean, AFP quoted Australian authorities as saying on Friday.

The aircraft was reported missing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. Several teams from different countries had been looking for the Boeing 777 in a 1.2 lakh sqkm area of the Indian Ocean. Over $150 million (Rs 1,020 crore approximately) had been spent on the search, making it the most expensive search operation in aviation history.

On Friday, Australia’s chief science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, released a report in which it had modelled the drift of a genuine Boeing 777 flaperon in the ocean, and revealed that MH 370 was likely to have crashed north of the search zone, The Guardian said. David Griffin, who led the research team, said that testing an almost identical flaperon had “added an extra level of assurance to the findings from our earlier drift modelling work”, the newspaper added.

Debris from the aircraft had been found on the French island of Reunion, in Mozambique, South Africa and Rodrigues Island and Mauritius, among other sites.

In January this year, the Australian government had said that the underwater search for the missing flight could resume in the future, a day after it was announced that the nearly three-year long search had been called off. “I don’t rule out a future underwater search by any stretch,” Australian Transport Minister Darren Chester had said.