Aussie experts claim they have further narrowed missing MH370 flight location

CANBERRA: An Australian research team on Wednesday claimed that they have narrowed the location of the missing MH370 flight down to just a fraction of the ocean search area previously explored by Australian, Malaysian and Chinese authorities, China’ s Xinhua news agency reported.

Speaking at the Australian Marine Sciences Association (AMSA) national conference in Darwin, David Griffin, head of the team from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation ( CSIRO), said his team had continued ana ly sing drift modelling data well after the ocean search had concluded, estimating that the plane went down along the ‘seventh arc’.

Griffin said, “There’s a strong current crossing across the seventh arc at (a l atitude of ) 35 degrees south, so we think the plane crashed into that current going to t he north-west ... That explains why debris didn’t arrive in Australia.”

In January, a joint statement from t he g overnments o f Australia, Malaysia and China said th e o cean s earch f or th e missing Ma laysian Ai rlines flight MH370 would be ‘suspended indefinitely’ until ‘credible new evidence’ came to light.

MH370 w as a sch eduled passenger f light b ound f or Beijing f rom Ku ala L umpur. It disappeared o n Ma rch 8, 2 014 with 239 passengers and crew on board.

During t he ocea n sea rch operation which lasted two years, authorities combed a 120,000 sq km patch of the Indian Ocean to no avail, with no sign of the plane to be found.

According to G riffin, t he researchers b uried t hemselves in satellite data to determine the exact sea level height on March 8, 2014 – when the jet disappeared – and from that, they were able to determine the direction in which ocean currents flowed.

“So t hat’s t he ba sis of h ow we know this current was flowing across the seventh arc at this time,” Griffin said at the conference.

He s aid th at th e C SIRO – Australia’s g overnment- funded scientific agency – had passed on the information to the authorities in charge of the search of MH370, but the government has not yet mentioned w hether or not t he ocean search would resume. — Bernama