MH370 remains world’s greatest aviation mystery

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished without a trace five years ago in the southern Indian Ocean and the most pertinent questions in the world’s greatest aviation mystery remain unanswered – where are you and what exactly happened?

The fate of the Boeing 777 passenger jetliner, which vanished from the radar while on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board, continues to baffle aviation experts, family members, friends and people from all over the world.

The last search operations to locate the aircraft ended last May when US-based exploration company Ocean Infinity failed to locate the ill-fated aircraft after searching over 112,000sq km of the ocean floor in a more than three-month search operation.

To date, only three wing fragments, known as flaperon, have been confirmed to “definitely” come from Flight MH370.

According to news reports, investigators found that the numbers on the parts matched the plane’s serial number and identification numbers belonging to parts uniquely made for Malaysia Airlines.

The right wing flaperon was found on a beach in Saint Denis on Reunion Island in July 2015 and the left outboard flap trailing edge was found in Mauritius in May 2016, while the right outboard flap was found on an island in Tanzania in June 2016.

About 30 pieces of debris were also reportedly found on the African coast and islands in the Indian Ocean. Most of them were handed over to the authorities, with some confirmed to “almost certainly” be from MH370.

“Relaunching the investigation is perhaps good so that we can ascertain in a more concrete fashion the origin of the pieces of wreckage and plot the locations where they were found,” said local aviation expert Prof Dr Mohd Harridon Mohamed Suffian.

“Plotting will somehow unearth the pattern of flow of these pieces in the ocean and coalescing this with certain mathematical algorithms, we can perhaps pinpoint the crash site,” the Universiti Kuala Lumpur test pilot told Bernama recently.

Last July, the MH370 Safety Investigation Team concluded in a 449-page report that they could not determine the real cause of the plane’s disappearance, but did not rule out the possibility of “unlawful interference” by a third party.

On Sunday, when met at the fifth Annual MH370 Remembrance event, Transport Minister Anthony Loke said the Pakatan Harapan government was willing to listen to proposals from any exploration or search companies with credible leads and having the technology to restart the search.