MH370 wife hits out over inaction on new satellite images

MH370 mystery deepens as Australian woman whose husband was a passenger hits out at the Transport Minister.

A piece of MH370 that washed up at Reunion.

An Australian woman whose husband was a passenger on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 says she is “seething” and has lashed out at Australian and Malaysian authorities for shrugging off new satellite evidence that may have pinpointed the plane’s crash site.

The comments come as oceanographers from the CSIRO say they have “unprecedented” confidence that they can use Australia’s biggest supercomputer to find MH370’s wreckage on a tiny strip of sea floor.

Despite mounting calls for the search to be resumed, transport safety bureaucrats are failing to take steps that could substantiate the scientists’ conclusion.

The inaction infuriated Danica Weeks, who was left to take care of her two children after her husband Paul disappeared with the plane on March 7, 2014.

She has urged Transport Minister Darren Chester to put greater pressure on his Malaysian counterparts.

New CSIRO modelling of images of possible debris, taken by a French surveillance satellite just 15 days after the flight went down with 239 passengers and crew, tracks its likely resting place to a narrow band of the Indian Ocean just outside an earlier search zone.

Mr Chester said on Wednesday while he welcome the reports, they did not provide evidence leading to a specific location of MH370 and that it was up to ­Malaysia to initiate a new search.

Ms Weeks said the new reports were as specific as could be hoped for. “I’m infuriated. No, I’m seething at Darren Chester’s response,” she said. “This is a Boeing 777 that has had something go wrong. It’s gone missing and it’s a commercial aeroplane. Until we know what happened, nobody can board a commercial aeroplane and feel safe. That means you, and that means me.”

David Griffin, principal research scientist with CSIRO’s Oceans and Atmosphere division, said the pinpointed strip was 100km long at most and possibly as little as 10km wide. He was confident that if searchers looked there they would find something, and such an undertaking would be a minor investment compared with efforts so far. “You can never be sure, but we used about seven lines of evidence to come to that conclusion,” he said.

The finding hinges on assumptions that up to nine objects captured in one of the images, classified in a Geoscience Australia report as “probably man-made”, are from the aircraft. “To completely reject the possibility that any of these objects are pieces of (MH370) is difficult to defend,” CSIRO’s report says.

However, the GA researchers left open the possibility that the objects were “wave glint” or some other natural phenomenon. They said the best way to be sure would be to analyse other images taken by the same instrument on the same satellite and in a “similar sea-state”, but where “unnatural” debris was unexpected.

“For this reason, examination of further images is likely to be of value,” the GA report says.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which has responsibility for obtaining the extra images, was asked whether, when and how the bureau would acquire them. A spokesman said it was “considering future ­actions”.

It would focus particular attention on an area 3000sq km at most — a far cry from the 120,000sq km region already scoured with deep-sea sonar. Dr Griffin said scientists owed their new-found confidence to the fact the images had been taken 15 days after the flight went down. Previous modelling had hinged on wreckage that washed up 500 days later on Reunion, about 4000km away.

“We’re only having to backtrack for two weeks in this case,” he said.

The estimates made use of an ocean current model the agency has been refining for 15 years as part of its efforts to build Australia’s forecasting capability.

“I can throw in particles in any random place in the world, and track them forwards or backwards for a week, a year, 10 years,” he said.