New MH370 poised to begin as experts air concerns about ‘flawed methodology’
A third search for missing Malaysia Airlines’ flight MH370 appears poised to begin in the Southern Indian Ocean.
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A much anticipated third search for missing Malaysia Airlines’ flight MH370 is poised to begin in the Southern Indian Ocean with an Ocean Infinity vessel moving into an area missed on previous missions.
The Malaysian Government announced in December it had signed an in-principle agreement with the US robotics firm on a “no find, no fee” basis, with the first four months of the year considered the best time to undertake a search.
Although it’s unclear if a contract has been finalised, marine tracking sites show the Ocean Infinity vessel Armada 7806 left Port Louis in Mauritius on February 4.
The latest location of the vessel is “offshore Australia” at the site of the “seventh arc”, considered the most likely final resting place of the Boeing 777, which disappeared on March 8, 2014.
There were 239 people on board the flight, including six Australians, who had been expecting to fly to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur as scheduled.
Since then two searches of the Southern Indian Ocean have been undertaken, covering close to 200,000 square kilometres of sea bed, without success.
A total of 37 pieces of debris from the missing jet have been recovered from various locations including Mauritius and Madagascar.
Armada 7806 has three deep-diving autonomous underwater vehicles on board, which will be used to scour the seabed for evidence of the aircraft more than four kilometres below the ocean’s surface.
A steep escarpment not scanned in Ocean Infinity’s 2018 search, or during the Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s campaign from 2014 to 2017, is believed to be the focus of the mission.
Sea conditions are currently not ideal for the search, with a 3 metre swell which could delay the launch of the AUVs.
Australian researcher Mick Gilbert, whose analysis has helped inform a network of MH370 investigators known as the Independent Group, said Ocean Infinity faced an “extraordinarily challenging task”.
“Ocean Infinity have defined their search areas around the best estimates for where MH370 may have ended its flight based on the evidence to hand, namely the aircraft’s known performance characteristics, the weather along likely flight paths that night and morning, the satellite data and oceanographic modelling of the paths likely taken by the recovered wreckage items,” said Mr Gilbert.
“All that said, Ocean Infinity are just working on best estimates built on a very sparse set of data.”
Former RAAF and Qantas pilot Mike Glynn, whose own research revealed MH370’s Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah originally planned the mass murder-suicide mission for a flight to Jeddah, was concerned the new search was based on misleading data.
He said methodology developed by retired aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey was flawed, relying on anomalies in radio signals known as WSPR, or weak signal propagation reporter.
“The theory says if you track all links with anomalies in them, you can track where the aircraft went, but you can’t,” said Mr Glynn.
“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 it was of concern the Malaysian Government was treating the theory as credible new evidence.
“It’s absolutely not and it will lead to another (search) failure,” Mr Glynn said.
Mr Gilbert said there was certainly no guarantee of a positive outcome to the Ocean Infinity search, but the fact it was being undertaken opened up the possibility of a result.
“Even with the leading edge technology being deployed by Ocean Infinity, if a wreckage item is even one centimetre beyond the sonar detection swathe, it won’t be detected,” said Mr Gilbert.
“Cautious optimism, tempered by an understanding of the reality of the challenges and difficulties, is possibly the order of the day.”
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Originally published as New MH370 poised to begin as experts air concerns about ‘flawed methodology’
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