Debris finds cast new doubt over MH370 search zone

Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 could be up to 500km north of the current search zone, debris analysis suggests.

Investigators examine aircraft debris found off the coast of Tanzania.

Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 could be as far as 500 kilometres north of the Australian-led search zone, according to new debris drift analysis conducted by a team of Italian researchers.

The researchers — whose findings were published in research journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences today — have run a new computer simulation that indicates wreckage from the plane could have originated up to around 500km further to the north than where the search is currently being conducted by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.

The two-and-a-half year search is scouring the last 10,000sq km of its designated 120,000sq km search area along a zone on the “seventh arc” in the southern Indian Ocean.

But nothing related to MH370 — which disappeared during a flight from the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, to Beijing in March 2014, carrying 239 passengers and crew — has been found in the area that stretches from 35.5 degrees south to 39.5 degree south.

The new drift modelling shows that pieces of aircraft debris discovered in Réunion, Mozambique, South Africa and Rodrigues Island most likely originated from an area further north than the search area, between the latitudes of 28 degrees and 35 degrees south.

“Our simulation shows that the debris could also have originated up to around 500km further to the north. If nothing is found in the current search area, it may be worth extending the search in this direction,” said Eric Jansen, a researcher at the euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change in Italy and lead-author of the study.

“Our result is the first to calculate the movement of the debris that best agrees with all five of the currently confirmed discoveries. This should make it the most accurate prediction.”

This is not the first time that it has been suggested the ATSB has been searching in the wrong place for the missing Boeing 777. Other research groups, including the so-called Independent Group of professionals who have been conducting their own work to locate MH370, argued in a July paper that the ATSB was also looking in the wrong spot.

The ATSB yesterday declined to respond to the paper’s findings.

The search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 will be suspended if it is not found in the current search area, transport ministers from Malaysia, China and Australia said last week.

The Italian team of researchers came to their conclusion by running a computer simulation using oceanographic data from the EU Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service. This included data of global surface currents and winds over the past two years.

To improve their simulation they used the locations of the five confirmed debris found to date and placed a large number of virtual particles in the ocean to map their routes along the ocean currents and winds.

A number of variables, including the exact crash location and the effect of wind and currents on the debris remain unknown, so the researchers simulated different scenarios to construct a so-called superensemble: a combination of simulations that best describes the debris found so far.

The results indicate that the most probable locations to discover additional washed up debris are Tanzania and Mozambique, as well as the islands of Madagascar, Réunion, Mauritius and the Comoros.

“The disappearance of flight MH370 is probably one of the most bizarre events in modern history. It is important to understand what happened, not only for all the people directly involved, but also for the safety of aviation in general. We hope that we can contribute to this, even if our study is just a small piece of a very complicated puzzle,” Mr Jansen said.