Report: Search for Malaysia 370 'almost certainly' flew over floating debris and missed it
An Australian government report Tuesday about the search for Malaysia Airlines flight 370 offer the tantalizing conclusion 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 crash can’t be confirmed unless the main wreckage is eventually found.
But the 14-page report from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization said numerous pieces of the plane 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 440-page 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 plane.
“It is almost inconceivable and certainly societally unacceptable in the modern aviation era with 10 million passengers boarding commercial aircraft every day, for a large commercial aircraft to be missing and for the world not to know with certainty what became of the aircraft and those on board,” the report said.
Greg Hood, the Australian bureau’s chief commissioner, said the deepest sympathies remain with people who know somebody lost on the flight.
“This was an unprecedented endeavor and there has been an extraordinary response from the global community,” Greg Hood, the bureau’s chief commissioner, said in a statement. “It remains a great tragedy, and we wish that we could have brought complete closure to the bereaved.”
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Floating debris typically offers a way to narrow an ocean search for a plane. After a crash that breaks apart the plane, debris such as life jackets, evacuation slides and seat cushions often float for weeks before becoming waterlogged and sinking.
In the case of Malaysia 370, searchers aboard aircraft spotted wooden pallets and fishing equipment. More than 30 pieces of debris were recovered by ships but considered unlikely to belong to the plane, according to the bureau report.
More than 500 days after the crash, a piece of the wing called a flaperon was the first confirmed debris to wash up, on the island of La Reunion, in July 2015.
At least 18 pieces of the plane, including parts of an engine cowling and a bulkhead panel, eventually were recovered from beaches in Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, South Africa and Tanzania.
Studies since then have compared those discoveries with ocean currents in an effort to nail down the best places to search the ocean floor. So-called drift modeling also allowed scientists to check the efficiency of the initial search of the ocean surface.
Eight to 11 planes, some equipped with maritime radar, flew over the ocean each day in late March 2014 to look for the suspected crash zone about 1,000 miles west of Perth. The search focused on that remote region after scanning two other areas closer to the Malaysian peninsula because of uncertainty about the plane’s tracking.
By that point, the search was based on an analysis of satellite tracking that offered clues – but not a precise location – about where the plane might have gone down, near an undersea formation called Broken Ridge.
"The intent was to cover as wide an area as possible with the satellites in the hope that aircraft debris floating on the ocean surface could be identified in order to focus the aerial and surface vessel search," the final bureau report said.
Search plans flew across regions each day ranging from nearly the size of Wisconsin to larger than Nevada. Bad weather would have hindered visibility. Ocean currents could have spread the debris in different shapes after 20 days, leading to mistakes about where precisely to look.
To further study the effectiveness of the surface search, scientists suggested studying more closely how debris would float in that remote region after 20 days.
“Winds, waves and ocean turbulence disperse objects, potentially over large distances after a week at sea,” the debris-drift report said.