(Bloomberg) -- Paul Kennedy couldn’t believe what his sonarshowed him March 7: what looked like a debris field on the floor ofthe Indian Ocean. It’s Flight 370, he thought -- the MalaysiaAirlines plane that had vanished 364 days earlier.

A camera was raced down to confirm that the aircraft’s wreckagehad been found. Satellite Internet on the search vessels was cutoff to prevent the news from leaking.

“We thought, ‘We might have solved this,’” Kennedy, a deputymanaging director at search operators Fugro NV, said in aninterview. “It was the right size, the right shape.”

The cameras brought back the truth: No wreckage, just volcanicboulders and starfish crawling over a silty sea floor.

At Fugro’s operations center, surrounded by mallee-tree scrub inthe northern suburbs of Perth, Australia, analysts who’ve beenclicking through orange-and-yellow sonar images in search of theplane since last October aren’t deterred.

“Most people come to work and think, ‘Maybe today’s the day,’”said Steve Duffield, the local managing director for Leidschendam,Netherlands-based Fugro. “We’re a long way ahead, because now weknow where the plane isn’t.”

While investigators try to understand why a Germanwings pilotdeliberately crashed his flight on March 24, the current search forMalaysian Airline System Bhd.’s Flight 370 is winding down with noanswers about the fate of the 239 people on board.

Australia’s A$39 million ($30 million) contract with Fugro runsthrough August 2016, but Australia, Malaysia and China haven’tagreed on funding for any further searching after May. Governmentministers are slated to meet to discuss the issue later this month,a spokesman for Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss saidby e-mail.

More than 60% of the main search zone has been scanned withoutfinding any sign of the Boeing Co. 777-200. The rest of the zoneshould be analyzed more quickly, Duffield said, allowing searchersto finish the task before the end of May, when the seas become toorough to navigate.

Fugro, which mostly surveys the seabed for oil and gas andtelecommunications-cable companies, has nearly 200 people dedicatedto the search, including two 30-person crews on each of its threesearch vessels.

Fewer than 20 people sit at desks here in Perth, carrying outmore detailed analysis of the roughly 10 objects a week deemedworthy of further study. Hopes still run high among members of theteam.

“We’re absolutely in the right spot -- all the analysis has beendone,” Kennedy said, examining a spare sonar submersible in a quietwarehouse two minutes’ drive from the operations center. “It’sactually getting more exciting as we get closer.”

Duffield, who expects that the search will indeed continuebeyond the current stage, is already fitting out his ships tohandle winter weather further to the north, where seas arecalmer.

The main question at this stage is whether Flight 370 glided forlonger than expected after it ran out of fuel, or plunged into thesea further north than assumed, Martin Dolan, chief commissioner ofthe Australian Transport Safety Bureau, said in a March 27interview.

It’s “possible but highly unlikely” that one of the pilots wasflying the plane to the end, said Dolan, the main governmentofficial responsible for the hunt.

“Our assumption, based on the evidence available to us, is crewincapacitation,” he said by phone from Canberra. “There was no oneactually at the controls.”

If the plane isn’t found by late May and funds permit furtherinvestigation, “we would move further north, but we’d also have tocontemplate whether we would go wider” from the place where fuelran out, Dolan said.

For the moment, Duffield is focused on filling in gaps thatamount to four or five percent of the 36,000 square kilometersscanned so far.

Eyeballing the images is still the most reliable way of spottingdebris, said Magnus Windle, the team’s lead geophysicist.

“We’ve logged hundreds of contacts, and 99% of them look likethat,” he said, pointing to a yellow smudge on his computer screenthat indicates an object sticking above the seafloor. “The plane’snot going to be sitting there as a beautiful silhouette with twoengines and a tailfin and everything else. We’re just not going tosee that.”

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