The hunt for Flight MH370 has failed to turn up any debris, but its unprecedented scale in one of the world’s remotest locations has provided valuable lessons for future search and rescue missions.
The Malaysia Airlines aircraft disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, last year. Mourning families and friends of the 239 people on board are still waiting to hear what happened 12 months later.
There has been no trace of the Boeing aircraft despite an extensive air and sea search.
Four ships, coordinated by Australia, continue to scour a huge underwater area at least 1,600km from the nearest piece of land in a stretch of the Indian Ocean previously only mapped by satellite.
“The size of the area we’re covering is unprecedented,” Australian Transport Safety Bureau commissioner Martin Dolan told reporters. “At most, when the French were looking for Air France 447, it covered a quarter of the sort of area we have in mind.”
Air France Flight AF447 was hauled from the Atlantic nearly two years after it crashed in 2009 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
The MH370 search — jointly funded by Australia and Malaysia with a budget of A$120 million (US$92.6 million) — is focused on a 60,000km2 priority area and is scheduled to end in May.
The thin, long stretch of water is within the so-called seventh arc, where the plane was calculated to have emitted a final satellite “handshake.”
After months of painstaking efforts, which have seen the ocean floor in the area mapped for the first time, all authorities have found is a handful of shipping containers.
The search area is so remote that the four vessels involved — Fugro Supporter, Fugro Equator, Fugro Discovery and GO Phoenix — need up to six days to reach it from the Australian port of Fremantle, where they routinely refuel and restock.
While at sea, they frequently encounter conditions similar to the “Roaring Forties” north of Antarctica, winds that whip up mountainous seas.
The turbulence penetrates below the ocean surface, buffering the 10km-long tow cables extending into the water with sophisticated sonar systems attached.
The systems scour the never-before studied ocean floor in pitch-black conditions, with the plane believed to have sunk to depths of 4,000m.
“Sunlight doesn’t get more than about 300m or 400m into the sea and we’re talking about 4,000m depth... literally working in the dark,” Dolan said. “We’ve got the capacity to take video images and photographs of areas, but we will only turn that on when we think we’ve got something that needs a closer look.”
The challenges reflect how little is known about the world’s open oceans.
“We know more of the moon than we know about the bottom of our oceans. The maps that we have of the moon are 25 times better than the maps we have of our oceans,” Imperial College London oceanographer Erik van Sebille told reporters.
The mapping of the ocean floor in the MH370 zone and other areas could eventually yield insights into sea life, habitat and even mining potential, he said.
So far, 2,000m cliffs, volcano clusters, undersea mountains, ridges and valleys — similar to land features — have been discovered in the area MH370 is thought to have come down, Dolan said, adding that the probing of such a vast and remote area means officials have broken new ground while trying to ensure reliable data is recorded.
“We’ve probably taken a step forward there [on the] quality, including the quality assurance of the data,” Dolan said. “The lessons are... that the planning and coordination of this is complex and requires a lot of effort. We drew extensively on the experience of our French colleagues with Air France 447, so we learned from them. We’ll be able to pass on [our lessons] to others who may come after us.”
The MH370 probe has helped prove the effectiveness of the next generation of search tools, including synthetic aperture sonar — which collects higher-resolution readings.
Dolan remains confident the more than 200-strong international team working to find the jet will be successful, but said: “Because of the nature of the [satellite data] calculations, there’s no absolute guarantee it’s there, just very likely.”
Van Sebille likens the search to looking for a set of house keys lost in London in complete darkness.
“That’s the kind of scale that you have to work with, but of course if you don’t try at all, you are certain not to find it,” he said.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the