Australian authorities say they have helped make the Indian Ocean safer for air and sea travellers since the Malaysian airliner vanished in the vast expanse four years ago through search and rescue training with island nations.
Search and rescue officials from Mauritius, Maldives and Sri Lanka are visiting the Australian Maritime Safety Authority headquarters in Canberra this week as part of a regional training program that began in 2015.
An Australian search and rescue co-ordinator who is taking part in the training, Rick Allen, said five Sri Lankan fishermen had been rescued more quickly and efficiently after their boat sank in 2016 thanks to an Australian online broadcast system to alert merchant shipping to an emergency that had been rolled out to the three countries.
"We're all about strengthening the response options that are available in search and rescue. We're particularly dealing in that remote northwestern part of the Indian Ocean," Allen said.
"Already we're seeing benefits. So the program not only involved work-shopping, meeting together, it also involved delivering systems and delivering tool that enable our partners to work more effectively in search and rescue."
Australia has developed particular expertise in search and rescue operations that test the limits of the distances that search planes can stay airborne.
Because of Australia's isolation it has a search and rescue responsibility for around 10 per cent of the Earth's surface.
From a second-floor control room in Canberra, the authority co-ordinated a massive multinational search by air and sea search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
The plane is thought to have crashed in the remote, far southern Indian Ocean on March 8, 2014. The Boeing 777 with 239 passengers and crew on board was initially thought to have crashed on its flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Subsequent information confirmed the plane had flown far off course.
Aircraft based in Perth searched for more than a month across more than 4.6 million square kilometres of ocean.
