Naval expert issues dire warning about new search for MH370 as he details a little understood danger
A fresh search for doomed Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 off Australian waters ‘could turn catastrophic very, very quickly’, experts have warned.
Flight MH370, a Boeing 777 carrying 227 passengers, including six Australians, vanished after departing Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8, 2014.
Previous searches have scoured 200,000 square kilometres of ocean to no avail.
Now, a much-anticipated third search effort is underway in a previously unprobed 15,000 square kilometre stretch of the Indian Ocean about 1,500km of the coast of Perth.
US-British robotics firm Ocean Infinity have their vessel, Armada 7806, poised in the area waiting to dispatch their autonomous undersea drones to the sea floor six kilometres below.
The drones will scan the sea floor, report anomalies, and are capable of taking images which can be sent back to searchers on board the vessel.
It’s believed the company will hone in on a zone near the previously scoured ‘seventh arc’, where the plane is expected to have lost fuel, informed by further data analyses by independent researchers in the past ten years.
The Malaysian government announced it had signed a ‘no find, no fee’ agreement last December for Ocean Infinity to undertake a search of the area.
Ocean Infinity’s Armada 7806 is bobbing in the Indian Ocean as efforts get underway to recover the wreckage of MH370
Former Australian naval officer Peter Waring said he hopes the search isn’t a ‘false dawn’
Former Australian naval officer Peter Waring said the technology being used in the search was top of the line.
‘What these new Ocean Infinity vessels represent quite frankly, is as big a transition in maritime technology as the movement from sail to steam in the 1800s,’ he told 60 Minutes.
‘It is a giant leap in, in maritime technology.’
However, the technology can only get searchers so far in the open ocean, where where waves as high as 20 metres have been recorded in the new search area.
‘There’s absolutely no shelter out there and there’s nowhere to hide,’ Mr Waring warned.
‘You’re six or seven days away from the nearest port, which is Perth.
‘These are dangerous conditions, if something goes wrong, it will turn catastrophic very, very quickly.’
This is Ocean Infinity’s second effort to find the wreckage after a failed attempt in 2018.
Experts fear the conditions in the Indian Ocean could make recovery crews’ work difficult. Pictured are searchers in 2014
‘We’ve been here before, there’s been lots of searches in the past,’ Mr Waring said.
‘There’s been lots of promises made and I’m really hoping this time that we find the aircraft and that we can put it all to rest.
‘This is a mystery that really tears at the fabric of reality, and maybe it’ll stitch it back together again slightly.
Deep sea explorer and electrical engineer Craig Wallace also warned the about the gruelling conditions.
‘The Indian Ocean that they’re working in is, is among the worst in the world,’ he said.
‘They’ve recorded wave heights of 20 meters, so 60 feet. It’s extreme conditions and there will be a lot of times where they simply cannot launch or recover the vehicle.’
With the aid of autonomous underwater drones, recovery crews hope to scour the sea floor
Ocean Infinity are believed to have identified their search area based on the estimated location of the seventh arc, the aircraft’s performance characteristics and the weather along the flight paths on the night and morning of March 8, 2014.
The recovery experts will also factor in satellite data and oceanographic modelling of the probable travel paths of the 37 salvaged aircraft components which have washed up as far away as Mauritius and Madagascar.
Former RAAF and Qantas pilot Mike Glynn suggested other data relied upon in the investigation was misleading.
He said the methodology, developed by a retired aerospace engineer, relied on anomalies in radio signals measured in what’s known as weak signal propagation reporter tracking.
‘The theory says if you track all links with anomalies in them, you can track where the aircraft went, but you can’t,’ he told the Australian.
‘These links are tens of thousands of kilometres long and there’s no identification of the aircraft that went through. All you get is an anomaly in the signal which can be caused by a lot of things.’
He said the Malaysian government was hopeful the theory equated to evidence that would bring them closer to the wreckage of MH370.
‘It’s absolutely not and it will lead to another [search] failure,’ Mr Glynn said.
Mr Glynn believes Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah originally planned a mass murder-suicide for the flight.
At the present stage, jurisdiction over found wreckage is unclear.
Previous searches have covered some 200,000 square kilometres already since 2014
The Ocean Infinity vessel sailed toward their believed search site in February, though its exact location has not yet been disclosed
Experts hope analysis of black boxes in the wreckage could reveal the plane’s final moments.
‘Our responsibility and obligation and commitment is to the next of kin,’ Malaysian transport minister Anthony Loke told a press conference in December.
‘We hope this time will be positive, that the wreckage will be found and give closure to the families.’
Debris, some confirmed and some believed to be from the aircraft, has washed up along the coast of Africa and on islands in the Indian Ocean.
Loke said the proposal to resume the search in the southern Indian Ocean came from exploration firm Ocean Infinity, which had conducted the last search for the plane that ended in 2018.
