Most complex search in aviation history over after nearly 3 years
Print Edition
THE nearly three-year search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 ended yesterday — possibly forever.
The countries involved in the expensive and vast deep-sea hunt have shown no appetite for opening another phase.
Late last year, as ships with high-tech search equipment covered the last strips of the 120,000-square-kilometer search zone, experts concluded they should have been searching a smaller area immediately to the north.
But by then, US$160 million had already been spent by Malaysia, Australia and China, which had agreed over the summer not to search elsewhere without pinpoint evidence.
The transport ministers of those countries reiterated that decision yesterday in the joint communique issued by the Joint Agency Coordination Center in Australia that announced the search for Flight 370 — and the 239 people, many of them Chinese, aboard the aircraft — had been suspended.
‘Inescapable duty owed’
“Despite every effort using the best science available, cutting-edge technology, as well as modeling and advice from highly skilled professionals who are the best in their field, unfortunately, the search has not been able to locate the aircraft,” said the agency, which helped to lead the hunt for the Boeing 777 in remote waters west of Australia.
“Accordingly, the underwater search for MH370 has been suspended.”
Relatives of those lost on the plane, which vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, responded with anger. A support group, Voice 370, said that extending the search was “an inescapable duty owed to the flying public.”
But last year, Australia, Malaysia and China, which have each helped to fund the search, agreed that the hunt would be suspended once the search zone was exhausted unless new evidence emerges that pinpoints the plane’s specific location.
Since no technology currently exists that can tell investigators exactly where the plane is, that means the most expensive, complex search in aviation history is over, barring a change of heart from the three countries.
There is the possibility that a private donor could offer to bankroll a new search. But no one has stepped up yet, raising the bleak possibility that the world’s greatest aviation mystery may never be solved.
For the families of the aircraft’s 227 passengers and 12 crew members, that is a particularly bitter prospect given the recent acknowledgment by officials that they had been looking for the plane in the wrong place all along.
In December, the transport bureau announced that a review of the data used to estimate where the plane crashed, coupled with new information on ocean currents, strongly suggested that the plane hit the water in an area directly north of the search zone.
Officials investigating the plane’s disappearance recommended that search crews head north to a new 25,000-square-kilometer area identified in a recent analysis as where the plane most likely crashed.
But Australia’s government rejected that recommendation, saying the results of the experts’ analysis were not precise enough to justify continuing the hunt.
Investigators have been frustrated again and again in their efforts to find the aircraft. Hopes were repeatedly raised and smashed by false leads.
These include: underwater signals wrongly thought to be emanating from the plane’s black boxes; possible debris fields that turned out to be sea trash; oil slicks that contained no jet fuel; and a large object detected on the seabed that was just an old shipwreck.
In the absence of solid leads, investigators relied largely on an analysis of transmissions between the plane and a satellite to narrow down where in the world the jet ended up — a technique never previously used to find an aircraft.
Based on the transmissions, they narrowed down the possible crash zone to a vast arc of ocean slicing across the Southern Hemisphere.
Even then, the search zone was enormous and located in one of the most remote patches of water on Earth — 1,800 kilometers off Australia’s west coast. Much of the seabed had never even been mapped.
For years, search crews painstakingly combed the search area in several ships. Unmanned submarines were used to examine areas of rougher terrain and objects of interest picked up by sonar that required a closer look.
Then, in July 2015, came the first proof that the plane was indeed in the Indian Ocean: A wing flap from the aircraft was found on Reunion Island, east of Madagascar.
Since then, more than 20 objects either confirmed or believed to be from the plane have washed ashore on beaches throughout the Indian Ocean.
But while the debris proved the plane went down in the Indian Ocean, the location of the main underwater wreckage — and its crucial black box data recorders — remains stubbornly elusive.
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