Search probably missed Malaysia 370 debris
Jet’s fate remains maddening mystery
An Australian government report Tuesday about the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 concludes that search planes “almost certainly” flew over debris floating on the Indian Ocean weeks after the crash but missed it.
Like much about the search for the Boeing 777 that went missing March 8, 2014, with 239 people aboard, the location of the crash can’t be confirmed unless the main wreckage is found.
The 14-page report from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization said numerous pieces of the jet should have been widely dispersed and visible to search planes flying March 28 through April 1, 2014, and not bunched too close together to avoid detection.
Under two models about how the debris drifted, “the potential debris field was almost certainly overflown on several occasions during this 5-day period,” the report said. “But the models do not agree on which tracks came closest to the items, showing that the probability of detecting single items cannot reliably be estimated.”
The report prepared at the request of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau was released jointly Tuesday with the bureau’s 440page final report on the search. Australia led the search with the governments of Malaysia and China for the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The $160 million search was suspended in January after a painstaking sonar sweep of a section of ocean floor about the size of Pennsylvania and nearly 4 miles deep in spots. Searchers found shipwrecks, anchors and cable but no jet.