Has Malaysia Airlines plane wreckage been found? Debris has been found on a beach near Augusta, Western Australia but has not been identified [GETTY]

SEARCH teams have today been given fresh hope of solving the missing Malaysia Airlines plane mystery, as material washed up on the shore of south west Australia.

No description has yet been released of the debris, which was secured by police after it was discovered ashore six miles east of Augusta, western Australia.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau is examining photographs to assess if the material could be wreckage from missing Flight MH370.

The aircraft vanished without a trace on March 8 as it flew from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China.

It was carrying 239 people – 227 passengers and 12 crew – when it lost contact with air traffic controllers 120 nautical miles off the east coast of the Malaysian town of Kota Bharu.

So far no wreckage has been found.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott earlier said the plane's likely impact zone was 430 miles long and 50 miles wide.

Experts are currently searching a vast area off the coast of Perth.

More powerful sonar equipment may be brought in to try to trace the plane [EPA]

Mr Abbott insisted that failure to find any clue to the jet's crash site would not necessarily mean the end of the search.

He said: "If at the end of that period we find nothing, we are not going to abandon the search, we may well rethink the search, but we will not rest until we have done everything we can to solve this mystery.

We will not rest until we have done everything we can to solve this mystery - Tony Abbott, Australian Prime Minister

"We owe it to the families of the 239 people on board, we owe it to the hundreds of millions - indeed billions - of people who travel by air to try to get to the bottom of this.

"The only way we can get to the bottom of this is to keep searching the probable impact zone until we find something or until we have searched it as thoroughly as human ingenuity allows at this time."

Officials are planning on bringing in more powerful sonar equipment in order to search deeper into the Indian Ocean.

Sonar searches picked up a signal on April 8 consistent with a plane's black box, but the battery-powered signal has since faded.

A Bluefin-21 drone, which has currently scoured approximately 80 per cent of the 120 square mile search zone, may finish its search today.

A relative of Chinese passengers onboard the flight demands answers from Malaysian representatives [AP]

The news comes as families of those aboard the missing flight have urged search teams to investigate whether the plane could be in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

A request was reportedly made from next of kin to Malaysian Transport Minister Hishamuddin Hussein to "re-engage the Russian and Afghanistan governments in order to examine and verify the claim that MH370 landed in Afghanistan".

Yesterday, a source within the International Investigation Team (IIT) told Malaysia's New Straits Times they are looking into the theory the plane may not have crashed into the southern Indian Ocean, but could have been re-directed to another country or made a crash landing. .