It’s been six and a half years since Malaysian Airlines MH370 disappeared on route from Kuala
Lumpur to Beijing, China with the presumed loss of all 239 onboard. And yet despite the
most expensive air and sea search in aviation history and launching a whole raft of conspiracy
theories, only a few fragments of the plane have been discovered thousands of kilometres
away on the other side of the Indian ocean but aircraft's actual location is still a
mystery. So considering the all effort that has gone in the recovery mission and the research
into all the things we have found out since, why can’t we find MH370.
This video is sponsored by Brilliant
The loss of MH370 has become the biggest mystery in aviation history since the disappearance
of Emelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan in the central pacific whilst trying to circumnavigate
the globe in July 1937. But whereas Earhart’s disappearance has
been thought of as a tragic accident, the loss of MH370 has boiled down to two possible
outcomes. Firstly, something happened to the crew that incapacitated them and the plane
flew on by itself until it ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea soon after, how it
ended up in the Indian ocean when it was flying north to China still isn’t explained by
this scenario. The second is that someone on board took control
of the aircraft and deliberately flew it to a remote part of the Indian ocean and ditched
the plane. Either of these outcomes is disconcerting.
If the crew were incapacitated and the plane was left to fly by itself then it would be
imperative to find the try and find the cause. If however, it was a case of hijacking or
pilot suicide and the murder of all on board, then the ramifications would be also worse
for Malaysia as a whole. To many Malaysians, it's almost unthinkable that a well-respected
pilot of the national flag carrier could do such a thing and in an Asian culture loss
of face is one of the worst things that can happen.
This highlights the problem that MH370 poses, we just don’t know where it went down, but
to find it we need to know where it was in its final few hours.
Based on the evidence so far, it’s believed to be somewhere in the southern Indian ocean
around an area defined by a set of radio messages sent from a maintenance system that was never
in any way designed to be a location device and assuming it flew at altitude until it
ran out of fuel. Because there was no direct GPS tracking data
sent from the aircraft, it’s final course and location had to be reconstituted from
data picked up by the Inmarsat Satellite which received hourly maintenance broadcasts from
the planes ACARS datalink system. In the time from the receiving of the last transmission
to the crash which could have been anything from a few minutes to almost an hour, the
aircraft could have flown on for hundreds of kilometres.
By comparing the timing delay from the ACARS system to it arriving at the satellite situated
over the Indian ocean, the Inmarsat engineers were able to determine a possible route along
the so-called 7th arc that stretched from central Asia in the north to the southern
oceans in the south and passing about 2000km west of Perth, Australia.
Ruling out the northern path due to lack of radar evidence from the countries that it
would have to have flown over, left the southern route as the most probable. The data pings
also continued for a further six hours after military radar lost contact over Indonesia,
meaning that it must have been in the air and operational during this time.
The issue of how MH370 ended up in the sea also has a major impact on where the wreckage
is likely to be. If the aircraft was flying at a high altitude on autopilot without a
crew and ran out of fuel then it's likely to have ended up in a high-speed dive. In
similar accidents like the 1998 crash of Swissair 111 into the Atlantic, the effect of the high-speed
impact with the sea resulted in the plane breaking up into over 2 million pieces.
If MH370 did the same, then there would very few large pieces left to float away and the
distance travelled from the time the engines flamed out to hitting the sea would have been
quite short. In simulator tests, it was thought that it could have been up to about 37km.
If however, the plane was in a pilot controlled glide from the point of running out of fuel
to making a controlled landing in the sea relatively intact, simulator tests showed
the distance could be upto 130km. But this is assuming the pilot waited until it ran
of fuel, he could have just ditched the plane whilst it was still under power before the
fuel ran out to give the greatest chance of keeping the aircraft intact but either of
these scenarios could place it a considerable distance from the initial search area.
By analysing the Inmarsat data and knowing the amount of fuel the aircraft was carrying,
a search area of approximately 1,120,000 Km2 was defined, this was later prioritised down
to 120,000 km2. From 18th March to 29th April 2014, 21 aircraft
flew 345 flights with a combined flight time of over 3,177 hours together with 19 ships
from 8 countries. The initial belief by the ATSB, the Australian
Transport Safety Board was that the crew had been incapacitated by a hypoxia event like
a sudden decompression and the plane had flown on autopilot until the engines flamed out
due to lack of fuel. But this still had to take on a lot of assumptions such as flying
in a straight line and at altitude, either of which could be wrong and could make a huge
difference to where it really is. But this scenario defined the initial search
area which has been subject to underwater sonar scans in 2014 and has been the basis
for all the subsequent searches. However, investigators in the US and Europe
believe the evidence points towards a manual control takeover of the aircraft to fly it
into the southern Indian Ocean, an area renowned for rough seas, high winds and deep ocean
floors, as the Australian prime minister Tony Abbot said its "as close to nowhere as it's
possible to be". Part of this conclusion comes from the course
the aircraft took shortly after the last verbal communication and what happened next. All
the data transmissions from the aircraft were suddenly lost along with all communications,
pointing to someone turning off the main electrical power systems and then relying on up the emergency
Ram Air Turbine to provide enough power to just fly the aircraft and keeping a very careful
and well thought out course following the Thai - Malaysian border into straits of Malacca
before turning towards the southern oceans. This was done very carefully to avoid other
aircraft and raising concerns of the multiple civilian and military Air traffic Controllers
in the area. Once it was in the Indian ocean and out of Indonesian radar range, power seems
to have been partially re-instated as the ACARS system started working again.
This scenario was added to 16 months later with the discovery of an almost intact starboard
flaperon, something which crash investigators say would have been ripped apart by a high-speed
impact with the sea. This was based on previous high-speed impacts like the Swissair 111 and
computer modelling of how the flaperon would have reacted in varying crash scenarios.
The flaperon was also damaged in such a way as to indicate that it was extended at the
time, something which would only have been done during a pilot controlled landing and
if the aircraft had power. Only the trailing edge was eroded which suggests this was caused
by it hitting into the sea during a ditching of the aircraft.
Then there was the discovery a flight path found on a computer flight simulator at the
home of the pilot which followed a very similar path ending up in the approximate area of
where its believed to have disappeared. There were about 1000 other flight paths found on
the simulator but only one where the destination was the southern ocean, well away from any
possible place to land safely. 32 pieces of debris have been found that could
be linked to MH370 but only 3 have been positively identified. All these have been found on coasts
thousands of km’s away on the other side of the Indian ocean which is pretty much where
they were expected to be knowing the how currents flow around the from east to west.
No pieces have been on found the Australian coast even though it much closer to the presumed
crash site than where they ended up. Experts say this proves it had to have come down in
an area where the ocean current flows away from Australia and over to the western Indian
ocean. But whether that was much farther north or
south of the ATSBs estimate remains unknown. The barnacle growth found on the Flaperon
would only have occurred if it had been in the warm waters farther north for an extended
period of time, leading some at the Royal Aeronautical Society to suggest that it could
have been trying to land at Christmas Island but ran out of fuel due to flying at a much
lower altitude of 5000 feet and slower speed since leaving the straights of Malaca rather
than on to the Southern Indian Ocean. This is based on their extensive and exclusive
investigation of the air traffic control responses from all those countries involved and the
unusual course it took during the first part of the flight up until all radar contact was
lost and it entering the Indian ocean. But backtracking the debris from their final
position to try and locate where they entered the ocean years earlier is a very imprecise
science that can only give a general area over such long timespans but it doesn’t
rule out a more northerly or southerly crash location.
During the initial search and to direct submersible vehicles close to the seafloor to take a closer
look, high-resolution images of the ocean topography were required not only to know
where they are going but also to know how deep they were. In the initial aftermath,
some remote subs were sent to below there design depth simply because of the poor accuracy
of the existing maps. Although we have maps of all the ocean floors,
most of these come from gravitational maps created from satellite data which have a resolution
of about 2km per pixel. Greater accuracy of 300 meters per pixel is available from satellite
mounted radar altimeters but this is still far too low resolution to find even the largest
parts of an aircraft a few 10s of meters in size.
Due to the remoteness, bad weather and lack of commercial interest in the southern oceans
there has been very little in the way of high-resolution mapping done. What we do know is that the
rugged ocean terrain in this area could easily hide an object like an aircraft even one the
size of a Boeing 777. To find something as small as an aircraft
especially if it has broken up into smaller pieces requires high-resolution scanning equipment
such as side-scanning and multibeam sonar. In the search, these were towed behind ships
which travelled 24/7 across the search area. As the image data was coming in live, anything
found that could be of interest was marked so autonomous submersibles could be sent down
to investigate. Although the underwater survey revealed a
huge amount about the ocean floor in the area of the search, nothing from MH370 was found
and the joint Malay, Chinese and Australian search was eventually wound up in January
2017. In Oct 2017 the company Ocean Infinity offered
to search for MH370 on a “no find, no fee” basis for the Malaysian government on the
next most likely area based on the drift analysis conducted by CISRO the Australian national
science agency. This new search area is a bit farther south and based on the ocean currents
which travel towards Africa where all the existing wreckage was found.
In 2018, using the vessel “Seabed Constructor” and its eight Autonomous Underwater Vehicles,
Ocean Infinity searched 120,000 km2 over 3 months, discovering more about the ocean floor
and several shipwrecks at a depth of 3700 to 3900 meters dating back to the 19th century
but again no sign of the missing plane. And this is where we currently are, so could
we find MH370 if we really tried, I certainly think so, we have already ruled out certain
areas so we know where it isn’t. We could start searching to the north where the Royal
Aeronautical Society think it is or to the south where the US investigators think it
maybe but either way this is a very large area and there is still no guarantee.
So the sticking point now seems to be money, Malaysia is happy for third parties to restart
the search on limited areas but only on a “no find, no fee” basis so there will
be no blank cheques to look for it until found. $200 million has already been spent on the
search so far, making it the most expensive in aviation history. The 2018 search by Ocean
Infinity would have cost the Malaysian government $70 million if they had found the aircraft.
So working on that basis to produce a high-resolution search of a million square km would cost about
in the region of maybe about $500M and take a couple of years if other ships were to join
in the search. If we really wanted to find MH370 come what
may, and you had to perform a high-resolution search of a large chunk of the eastern Indian
Ocean west of Australia before locating it, several billion might be needed but I wouldn’t
place any bets on that happening anytime soon unless a benevolent billionaire decides to
pitch in with some funding.
If MH370 is in the sea, then the only way we will find it in the deep ocean is with
advanced sonar but this is a slow process with each sonar unit only able to travel at
around 4 km/h. In recent years, advances in AUV’s or Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
has allowed multiple units to work together as a group covering a much greater area in
the same time, essential for large searches like for MH370.
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