MH370 crash site theory: New report says it landed off Maldives
A new, damning report has found investigators involved in the search for MH370 have been looking in the wrong area the whole time.
World
Don't miss out on the headlines from World. Followed categories will be added to My News.
A new detailed report on the fate of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 concludes it is not in the Southern Indian Ocean but was attempting to land in the Maldives when it crashed.
BAE aerospace senior systems engineer Sergio Cavaiuolo has spent years of his private time analysing satellite data of the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing that disappeared on March 8, 2014 with 239 on board.
A renewed search was expected to be conducted this year with the Malaysian Government assessing a no-find no-fee option by a private company to look in three new areas all in the Southern Indian Ocean (SIO), but the plans stalled.
Now this new 68-page technical report handed to transport authorities in Malaysia – as well as some family of those on board including Queenslander Danica Weeks whose then husband Paul was a passenger and the family of flight captain Zaharie Shah – suggests a new possible location hundreds of kilometres away in the opposite direction of the original and proposed search zones.
And it follows the theory the plane went down as an emergency ditching not an intentional murder-suicide or high-altitude accident.
The new report was presented to some next of kin family first via a zoom forum late last month from Mr Cavaiuolo’s Adelaide home ahead of its planned online release for peer and public review.
“The plane never went to the Southern Indian Ocean because in the original analysis, the wrong timing data was inadvertently extracted from the raw satellite data and used as if it was the round trip time of the Handshake exchange which it is not,” Mr Cavaiuolo told News Corp Australia yesterday.
“This is why there are so many disconnects in this unprecedented aviation mystery and also why repeated searches of the 7th ARC region, is always turning up empty. It’s also why there’s no debris near Australia, it’s all been washing up in the West Indian Ocean along the coast of Africa because the debris has drifted from an MH370 ditch site in the Maldives not from a crash in the SIO.”
The round trip handshake time refers to the automated ‘ping’ log-on request initiated by the aircraft or ground station and back again, to track an aircraft while the 7th arc was a line across the ocean along where the aircraft would have run out of fuel based on its final suspected tracking.
Mr Cavaiuolo, an engineer who for the past 30 years has worked on leading commercial and military aerospace systems including navigation and radio communication, said his analysis shows how the Inmarsat satellite data corroborated sightings by witnesses on an island in the Maldives archipelago who reported an unidentified aircraft around 6am.
A preliminary brief on his Maldives theory was put up a few years ago, based on witness accounts but the new report revolves around the since further released data.
A four-year $200 million search over more than 120,000 square kilometre area ended in 2018 with the final resting place of the aircraft never identified. The Maldives sightings by locals were dismissed as fuel limits meant it could not have reached the island in daylight hours.
“They dismissed pretty much anything that didn’t sit with the SIO theory because they were already on their way looking in that area but this report I believes takes it further that needs to be considered,” Mr Cavaiuolo, who travelled to the Maldives as part of his research, said.
“There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever based on a new way to look at the data that it is there off the Maldives … about one hour out of the Maldives.”
MORE NEWS
Creepy posts fuel MH370 pilot fears
Must see TV: MH370 The Untold Story