FORTEAN FOLLOW-UPS
New updates on stories covered previously in FT
THE FATE OF MH370 [FT345:12]
In January, officials responsible for locating missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 announced that their two-year, £122 million search has come to an end. Having searched 120,000 km2 (46,332 miles2) of the southern Indian Ocean to a depth of 4.8km (three miles), teased out from the satellite data, they’ve found no trace of the plane and the 239 souls on board. However, a panel of experts, pointing to the locations of recovered debris, insist the search should be extended to include 25,000 km2 (9,653 miles2) north of the area already examined. On 4 March, families of those on board MH370 launched efforts to raise at least £12 million to fund a new Indian Ocean search.
A wing section called a flaperon was discovered on Reunion Island off Madagascar in July 2015, and confirmed as debris from MH370 the following September – it reportedly carried MH370’s “unique numbers”. Crash investigator LarryVance said that the damage pattern on the flaperon showed that the plane ended its flight in a controlled ditch; but another expert, Mike Exner, insisted the damage on the flaperon and another found subsequently was consistent with high-speed flutter, indicating a rapid uncontrolled descent [ FT438:69]. By November, seven of the 20 pieces of debris recovered from around the Indian Ocean were said to be almost certainly from the missing plane.
However in February, Jeff Wise, writing in the Huffington Post, asserted that the Réunion debris was completely coated in goose barnacles, a species that grows only immersed in the water. When the debris was tested in a flotation tank, it floated half out of the water. Wise said barnacles couldn’t have grown on the exposed areas, a conundrum officials were unable to reconcile. The implication is that the piece did not arrive on Réunion by natural means, a suspicion reinforced by a chemical analysis of one of the barnacles, showing that it grew in water temperatures that no naturally drifting piece of debris would have encountered. Wise also cast doubt on the identification of the other recovered debris (but failed to provide any evidence to back up his scepticism).
To recap: early on the morning of 8 March 2014, MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing. After 40 minutes it passed the last navigational waypoint in Malaysian airspace. Six seconds after that it went electronically dark. Wise says that in the brief gap between air-control zones, when no one was officially keeping an eye on it, the plane pulled a U-turn, crossed back through Malaysian airspace, and then vanished from military radar screens. At that point the plane was completely invisible, and could have been flown anywhere in the world without fear of discovery.
However, three minutes later, a Satellite Data Unit (SDU) rebooted and initiated a log-on with an Inmarsat communications satellite orbiting high overhead. Wise points out that an SDU reboot is not something that can happen accidentally, or that airline captains generally know how to do. Over the next six hours, the SDU sent seven automated signals before going silent for good. Soon after the SDU reboot, the plane apparently turned south, flew fast and straight until in ran out of fuel, then dived into the sea. Using this information,