Experts hunting for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 are attempting to define a new search area by studying where in the Indian Ocean the first piece of wreckage recovered from the lost Boeing 777 — a wing flap — most likely drifted from after the disaster that claimed 239 lives, the new leader of the search said.
Officials are planning the next phase of the deep-sea sonar search for Flight MH370 in case the current two-year search of 120,000km2 turns up nothing, said Australian Transport Safety Bureau Chief Commissioner Greg Hood, who took over leadership of the bureau last month.
However, a new search would require a new funding commitment, with Malaysia, Australia and China last month agreeing that the US$160 million search would be suspended once the current stretch of ocean southwest of Australia is exhausted unless new evidence emerges that would pinpoint a specific location of the aircraft.
“If it is not in the area which we defined, it’s going to be somewhere else in the near vicinity,” Hood said in an interview earlier this week.
Further analysis of the wing fragment known as a flaperon found on Reunion Island off the African coast in July last year — 15 months after the airplane went missing — will hopefully help narrow a possible next search area outside the current boundary.
Six replicas of the flaperon are to be sent to the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization’s oceanography department in Tasmania, where scientists will determine whether it is the wind or the currents that affect how they drift, Hood said.
This will enable more accurate drift modeling than is currently available.
If more money becomes available, the bureau, which is conducting the search on Malaysia’s behalf, plans to fit the flaperons with satellite beacons and set them adrift at different points in the southern Indian Ocean around March 8 next year — the third anniversary of the disaster — and track their movements.
Meanwhile, barnacles found on the flaperon and an adjacent wing flap that washed up on Tanzania in June are being analyzed for clues to the latitudes they might have come from. The flap is in the bureau’s headquarters in Canberra, where it has been scoured for clues by accident investigators.
Peter Foley, the bureau’s director of Flight MH370 search operations since the outset, said the enhanced drift modeling would hopefully narrow the next search area to a band of 5o of latitude, or 550km.
“Even the best drift analysis is not going to narrow it down to X marks the spot,” Foley said.
Some critics argue that the international working group that defined the current search area made a crucial mistake by concluding that the most likely scenario was that no one was at the controls when the airplane hit the ocean after flying more than five hours.
The aircraft veered far off course during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. What happened to the airplane has become one of the biggest mysteries in aviation, with a wide range of theories, including that a hijacker could have killed everyone on board early in the flight by depressurizing the aircraft.
The current search area was defined by analysis of a final satellite signal from the airplane that indicated it had run out of fuel. Scientists have determined how far the airplane could have traveled from a height of up to 12,200m after both engines lost power.
However, critics who favor the theory that captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah hijacked the airplane say he could have glided the airplane beyond the current search area.
Some say he could have made a controlled ditch at sea to minimize debris and make the airplane vanish as completely as possible.
Officials said Zaharie flew a similar route on his home flight simulator only weeks before the disaster.
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