Dutch engineering group Fugro has said it now thinks the aircraft could have glided rather than dived just before crashing into the Indian Ocean.

This revelation could mean the company, which is leading the underwater hunt for the jet, has been searching in the incorrect area, reports Reuters.

The search for the aircraft, which disappeared in March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew onboard en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, is expected to be called off in three months.

“If it’s not there, it means it’s somewhere else,” Fugro project director Paul Kennedy told the news agency.

Kennedy and his team believe if the plane glided it would have been manned until impact and would have travelled beyond the current search area marked out from satellite images.

“If it was manned it could glide for a long way,” Kennedy said. “You could glide it for further than our search area is, so I believe the logical conclusion will be, well, maybe, that is the other scenario.”

According to the Guardian, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), the agency which has been coordinating the search, has backed the current search zone despite numerous theories of the aircraft’s whereabouts.

It has used data from British satellite telecommunications company, Inmarsat to find the likely plunge point of the plane with an ATSB spokesperson telling Reuters,  “All survey data collected from the search for missing flight MH370 will be released.”