Search for missing airliner to move south
Print Edition
THE hunt for a missing Malaysian airliner has shifted to a remote part of the Indian Ocean where a British pilot has calculated the Boeing 777 made a controlled ditching last year with 239 people aboard, officials said yesterday.
The patch of deep ocean southwest of Australia that Captain Simon Hardy has determined is the most likely resting place of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 will be searched through December, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is coordinating the search on Malaysia’s behalf, said.
But Australian authorities are not being guided by the experienced Boeing 777 pilot’s analysis. Martin Dolan, the bureau’s chief commissioner, said the search was moving farther south within a 120,000 square kilometer priority area because the southern hemisphere spring had made extreme conditions in the southern ocean calmer.
“We’re aware that we’re in the area that Captain Hardy specifies, but we’re in that area because it was next in our search sequence, and we’ve been moving progressively south because the weather is improving,” Dolan said.
Hardy’s theory of where the plane went after it inexplicably flew far off course during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, has been widely published in recent months. He used mathematical analysis and a flight simulator to plot the course he believed the airliner took when it vanished in one of aviation’s most baffling mysteries.
“I am fairly confident that the wreckage will be found within the next four to eight weeks,” Hardy told The Australian newspaper.
In its statement, the bureau said: “There are many theories from members of the public and various independent experts and all are considered.” It described Hardy’s analysis as credible.
But searchers do not accept a key aspect of his conclusion: that whoever was flying the plane made a controlled landing at sea.
Dolan said authorities still believe a final satellite transmission from one of the jet’s engines indicated it was out of fuel, meaning the plane would have plummeted out of control and disintegrated.
China lost 154 of its citizens in the disaster.
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