New analysis helps refine MH370 search
HUNT NARROWS DOWN TO SOUTHERN TIPS OF MASSIVE SEARCH AREA IN INDIAN OCEAN
The deep sea hunt for the missing Malaysian airliner has been refocused on the southern reaches of an expansive search zone based on new analysis released yesterday of the Boeing 777’s final hours and how it might have plunged into the Indian Ocean with 239 people aboard after running out of fuel.
Searchers have been combing a 120,000-square-kilometre expanse of the Indian Ocean since October last year but have yet to turn up any trace of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. A wing flap found in July on the other side of the Indian Ocean when it washed up on remote Reunion Island is the only debris recovered.
The new analysis by a Defence Department agency confirmed “the highest probability” the final resting place for the plane was within the southern end of the search zone.
Two ships towing sidescan sonar have continued the search during the harsh southern hemisphere winter months. A third ship will join the search in the new priority area tomorrow, said Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief commissioner Martin Dolan, who runs the search on behalf of Malaysia.
The latest ship is equipped with a video camera inside an underwater unmanned submarine that can examine rough terrain and objects of interest detected by sonar that require a closer look.
A Chinese ship will join the search in late January equipped with Synthetic Aperture Sonar, state of the art technology that provides higher resolution images than the standard sonar now being used, Dolan said.
Some experts have been critical that the sonar was not used throughout the search and have questioned whether wreckage might have already been overlooked.
Dolan said about 4 per cent of the area already searched would have to be searched again because of gaps in the sonar mapping and because some objects that had been detected could not yet be ruled out.
About 54,000 square km of the 98,000 square km of the highest-priority search zone have already been searched, the bureau’s search director Peter Foley said. That area is 2,800km south-west of the Australian port of Fremantle.
‘Very difficult terrain’
Foley said the Synthetic Aperture Sonar and the camera would be used to examine a trench that runs north-south through the high priority zone, the Geelvinck Fracture Zone. “It’s very, very difficult terrain. Very steep drop offs. It’s pretty bad,” Foley said.
The latest analysis by a team of mathematicians and a satellite expert will likely be the last of the scant satellite clues that have been used to track the airliner’s final hours after it disappeared from radar on March 8, 2014, during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing.
One of the engines sent an hourly signal to a satellite and a final signal when it apparently ran out of fuel.
Team leader Neil Gordon said dozens of flights around the world were tracked to fine tune the analysis of these engine signals and to test the accuracy of their methodology.
The methodology was also extensively tested against the actual routes flown by the doomed jet on four previous flights and by two different Boeing 777s. The routes calculated by the methodology proved close to the actual routes.