MH370 find won’t alter hunt for plane
Print Edition
CONFIRMATION that a plane part that washed up on a remote island was from missing jet MH370 was useful but would not alter the search for the plane, Australian investigators said yesterday.
Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, welcomed this week’s news from France that the flaperon found on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion was part of the missing Boeing 777.
“We have been working on the assumption that the flaperon was associated with MH370,” Dolan told reporters. “It’s useful to have formal confirmation of this, so it’s good for us. But it hasn’t actually made a significant difference to our search.”
Australia is leading the difficult search in the southern Indian Ocean for the Malaysia Airlines plane which mysteriously diverted off course on March 8 last year and disappeared with 239 people on board, most of them Chinese.
Based on satellite analysis of the plane’s likely trajectory, searchers are scouring the seabed off Australia’s west coast, so far covering some 60,000 square kilometers without result.
Dolan said Australia was considering bringing in new vessels and equipment to take advantage of the upcoming southern hemisphere summer when the weather in the harsh and remote place will improve.
“We are currently reviewing the options available to us to see whether we will acquire other vessels and equipment for the summer period,” he said. “We haven’t made any decisions on that yet.”
Dolan said finding the flaperon, a 2-meter wing part, on Reunion, a French overseas territory, in late July was consistent with drift modeling based on the plane crashing in the search area.
“It hasn’t changed our thinking about the search area,” he said, adding that the flaperon also had not yielded any clues on what caused the plane to disappear on route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
“All we know is that the flaperon at some point became detached from the aircraft and there are a range of possible scenarios from that,” he said. “We will watch developments obviously but at this stage we haven’t seen anything that actually assists in refining or changing the search area.”
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