SEARCHING IN THE WRONG PLACE?
OFFICIALS at Fugro, the Dutch company leading the underwater search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, say the Boeing 777-200ER jetliner may have glided down, rather than dived in the final moments. This means search crews have been scouring the wrong pa
Fugro has been combing an area roughly the size of Greece for two years
Oceanographer: MH370 could have gone down slightly north of current search area
Malaysia-China-Australia tripartite meeting today to decide on the fate of the search
HYPOTHESIS: Deputy transport minister says assumptions not supported by facts
TOP searchers at the Dutch company leading the underwater hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 say they believe the plane may have glided down rather than dived in the final moments — meaning they have been scouring the wrong patch of ocean for two years.
Flight MH370 disappeared in March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew on board en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. Searchers, led by engineering group Fugro, have been combing an area roughly the size of Greece for two years.
That search, over 120,000 sq km of the southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia, is expected to end in three months and could be called off after that following a meeting of key countries — Malaysia, China and Australia — today. So far, nothing has been found.
“If it’s not there, it means it’s somewhere else,” Fugro project director Paul Kennedy was quoted by Reuters as saying.
While Kennedy did not exclude extreme possibilities that could have made the plane impossible to spot in the search zone, he and his team argued a more likely option was that the plane glided down — meaning it was manned at the end — and made it beyond the area marked out by calculations from satellite images.
“If it was manned, it could glide for a long way,” Kennedy said. “You could glide it for further than our search area. So, I believe the logical conclusion will be maybe that is the other scenario.”
Fugro’s controlled glide hypothesis is also the first time officials have lent some support to contested theories that someone was in control during the flight’s final moments.
Since the crash, there have been competing theories over whether one, both or no pilots were in control, whether it was hijacked, or whether all aboard perished and the plane was not manned when it hit the water.
The glide view is not supported by the investigating agencies — America’s Boeing Co, France’s Thales SA , United States’ investigator the National Transportation Safety Board, British satellite company Inmarsat PLC, the United Kingdom’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch and the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation.
In Canberra, AP quoted the oceanographer whose calculations helped an American adventurer find potential debris from Flight MH370 as saying that the jetliner could have crashed slightly north of the current search area.
Adventurer Blaine Gibson handed Malaysian authorities in Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday three pieces of debris and personal belongings he found on Madagascar beaches in June, which he suspects came from Flight MH370.
Western Australia university oceanographer Charitha Pattiaratchi said the same drift modelling that Gibson relied on led his team of oceanographers to suspect that the airliner could have gone down just north of the search area in the southern Indian Ocean.
“The best guess that we can think of is that it’s probably around the Broken Bridge region, which is slightly to the north of the area that they’re looking at,” Pattiaratchi said.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), the agency coordinating the search, had consistently defended the defined search zone. It did not respond to questions over whether it was assessing the controlled glide theory.
Authorities used data provided by Inmarsat to locate the likely plunge point through communication between the plane and satellite ground station.
“Survey data collected from the search for missing Flight MH370 will be released,” an ATSB spokesman said.
In Kuala Lumpur, Deputy Transport Minister Datuk Abdul Aziz Kaprawi said the statement made by MH370 searchers and not supported by facts.
“Their assumption is not supported by any verified data and facts.
The government does not operate or undertake any task solely based on assumptions,” he told the New Straits Times yesterday.
Aziz stressed that the government carried out work based on data verified by the authorities.
“We work based on data supplied by the authorities and experts, such as satellite data.”
Aziz said a tripartite meeting involving top level officials from Malaysia, China and Australia would be held in Putrajaya today to discuss the future of the search operation for Flight MH370.
“Further details on this matter will only be revealed after the tripartite meeting,” he said.
Department of Civil Aviation Malaysia director-general Datuk Seri Azharuddin Abdul Rahman said the searchers had to substantiate the statement made.
“The searchers should be asked on what basis they made the statement since they were the ones who made the claim. That’s their opinion. Do they have any proof that this (the plane gliding) happened?”
Voice 370, an association of families of the passengers and crew of Flight MH370, appealed to the three nations not to abandon the search
for the aircraft.
In a press conference yesterday, the group said if for any reason an immediate extension of the search cannot be carried out, the search should merely be suspended and not abandoned in totality while the obstacles were assessed and addressed.
Grace Nathan, whose mother, Anne Daisy, was on the flight, said Voice 370 requested, among others, for a concerted effort to be made to source a wider base of funding, which should include contributions from countries whose citizens were on Flight MH370.
“We were led to believe that the search was suspended due to lack of funds,” she said.
K.S. Narendran from Chennai, whose wife, Chandrika Sharma, was on the flight, said as the scanning of the last 10,000 sq km had been hindered by bad weather, locals of the East African coastline should, in the meantime, be educated to be on the lookout for potential debris.
Any further search would require a fresh round of funding from the three governments on top of the A$180 million (RM548 million) that has been spent, making it the most expensive in aviation history.