MH370: 300 days to search ocean

Three hundred days: That's how long a private contractor will have to cover a remote area of the Indian Ocean a little smaller than the country of Sri Lanka where officials believe missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 ended up, according to CNN.

The time frame for the sea floor search was included in documents released Wednesday by Australian authorities seeking bids from companies to carry out the next phase of the hunt for the passenger jet.

Nearly three months after Flight 370 disappeared over Southeast Asia, searchers have found no trace of the Boeing 777 or the 239 people aboard, making it one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history.

Authorities have not been able to explain why the jet veered dramatically off course during a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8 or to say where exactly its errant journey ended.

Hopes of closure for the families of those on board were raised in early April, when a search team in the southern Indian Ocean detected pings that were initially believed to have come from the plane's flight recorders. But last week, Australian authorities said that an exhaustive search of the sea floor around the pings had found no wreckage, ruling it out as the aircraft's final resting place.

Now, officials are preparing for the next stage of the search.

Australia, the closest country to the area where the plane is believed to have entered the ocean, has decided to delegate the management and operation of the new phase to a private company.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is leading the search at the request of the Malaysian government, said Wednesday that it is accepting proposals for the task until the end of June. The new search is expected to start in August, at the earliest.

The exact search area is yet to be defined, as an international team of experts is reviewing the satellite, radar and other data that led to the conclusion that the plane flew into the southern Indian Ocean. It will be in the vicinity of an arc hundreds of kilometers long -- the area where investigators believe the aircraft ran out of fuel, about 1,000 miles off the coast of Western Australia.