Search in wrong place

Aussie expert says political pressure hurt MH370 hunt

A former Australian naval officer who searched for MH370 has revealed the “political and bureaucratic” chaos that doomed the mission to fail, and the likely location of the wreckage on the ocean floor.

Survey and sea floor mapping expert Peter Waring, who was part of the Australian Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) in 2014, said they never searched the correct area due to a fundamental error in modelling.

He said the location of the wreckage was much further south than previously thought, but that the search team’s success was measured on how much ocean floor they scoured rather than if they were looking in the right spot.

“There was a whole lot wasted effort looking in the wrong areas,” Waring told The Sun in a bombshell interview.

Waring said he discussed the hypothesis, that the wreckage was much further south than the search area, with specialists in Canberra at the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB).

“I think we may have gone wrong with the assumption that the aircraft wasn’t under control at the end,” he said.

“We were taking this quite seriously during the search, that the aircraft may have continued to be under control in one form or another after it crossed the seventh arc.

“Once that had happened that means that the aircraft was probably further south.”

Waring left the search team in September 2015, when it was clear that the search area would not change no matter what evidence was presented.

While experts suggest the plane was ditched on the “seventh arc”, Waring believes the theory that “suicidal” pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah flew the jet more than 80km southwest of the previous search area and ditched over the Geelvinck Fracture Zone.

The trench is 800m deep and 11km wide, and Waring believes Shah, who is thought to have carried out a flight simulation to the area a month earlier, downed the aircraft in a controlled ditch to limit the debris field and hide the wreckage forever.

The theory was first proposed by Boeing 777 pilot Simon Hardy, who reverse engineered the plane’s flight path and pinpoint its likely location.

Waring said it was “blatantly clear” to people involved in the search that they were looking in the wrong place, but that politicians wanted a “clean nice neat box” that was never re-evaluated after new evidence arose.

“On the one hand, It was a slow-moving bureaucratic political process that wanted something really easy and neat which was a box drawn on a map,” he said.

“On the other hand you had one of the most complex mysteries that’s ever occurred and the amount of information was so scarce, so to try and create something out of nothing was really difficult.”