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It's a scene that no-one could have imagined when a Malaysian Airlines jet disappeared more than seven weeks ago - a farewell photo by the men and women who have searched in vain from the sky for the missing plane.

They posed with their aircraft in Perth to mark the official end to the huge international air search for MH370, which lost contact on March 8 with 239 passengers and crew.

A scaled down operation, including a few vessels on standby and an underwater search for the Boeing 777, will still continue for an indefinite amount of time.

So far not a single piece of debris, stretch of oil, or a clue of any kind has been found to pinpoint the location of the plane.

There have been 'pings' that might have come from the aircraft's two black boxes and experts have made their calculations from satellite data, but if the jet is at the bottom of the ocean its whereabouts have remained a mystery.

Eight nations have taken part in the search, either physically or using technical know-how but despite a number of hopeful sightings, the personnel who posed for Tuesday's photo have ended their relentless operation with nothing to show for it.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has conceded that if anything was left floating after the aircraft had, as experts believe, come down in the ocean, it would by now have become waterlogged and sunk.

Just when a new underwater search will begin has not been decided, with authorities saying the transition from surface to underwater would begin 'over the coming weeks.'

Never in the history of aviation has such a vast search been conducted, with eight nations - Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Malaysia, the US, Japan, South Korea and China - involved in the hunt, flying more than 300 sorties across an enormous expanse of unforgiving southern ocean.

Now the search planes have been stood down, a spokesman for the Australian-led Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre saying: 'Most of the aircraft will have left by the end of today.'

But an Australian P3 Orion will remain on standby in Perth.

As well as aircraft, as many as 14 ships from Australia, China and Britain were involved in the search for debris or listening for black box signals. Most of those vessels were today also pulling out.

'Some need to head back to port and refuel and give the crew a rest, while others will go back to doing what they were doing for their respective nations before they joined in the search,' the agency's spokesman said.

'In essence the surface search has been scaled back.

'We will keep a few vessels out there and others on standby, but the large-scale air and sea search has ended.'

The conclusion of the surface hunt will be a distressing landmark for relatives of the mostly-Chinese passengers who were on the aircraft.

Waiting for news in a hotel in Beijing, they have repeated daily that they want closure - to know what has happened to their loved ones.

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With no result, they now have only an underwater search - with no clues to pinpoint the correct area - to rely on. But first, they have to hear when that search will even begin.
The news of the scaled back search comes as the Chinese families of passengers and crew were played a recording of the finale exchange between the airplane's crew and ground control for the first time.

The families listened to the audio from the plane's cockpit during a public conference in Beijing on Tuesday, more than 50 days after the plane disappeared.

In the audio, a radar controller from the airport in Kuala Lumpur says: 'Malaysia three seven zero contact Ho Chi Min 120.9, good night.'

A male voice, believed to be a male crew member, replies: 'Good night Malaysian three seven zero.'

Officials explained that MH370 crew members did not respond to further requests to contact ground control.

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Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebookesterday an Australian company said it had located the wreckage of a commercial airliner lying on the ocean floor in the Bay of Bengal - an area located in the northern tip of the original search area, but thousands of miles from where authorities are currently focused.

Tech firm GeoResonance claims its sensor technology has found the wreckage of a plane in the Bay of Bengal, 118 miles south of Bangladesh.

The company said images taken of the same spot five days earlier showed it had appeared between the 5th and 10th of March 2014. The plane disappeared on March 8.

However, these claims have now been dismissed by search coordinators.

The Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC), which is managing the multinational search for the missing plane, said it continued to believe that the plane came down in the southern Indian Ocean off Australia

And it explained that the location in the GeoResonance report was not within the search arc that it has created from satellite information and other data to determine the missing aircraft's location.

'The joint international team is satisfied that the final resting place of the missing aircraft is in the southerly portion of the search arc,' it said, The Telegraph reports.