CSIRO’s narrow search area gives hope to grieving MH370 families

A piece of debris from flight MH370 on Reunion Island.

If Australia’s premiere scientific research body is right, the wreck of Malaysian Airlines MH370 and the ocean graves of 239 people on board could be found before the end of the Australian summer.

The CSIRO says it has narrowed down the likeliest location of the passenger plane that went missing on March 8, 2014, with “unprecedented precision and certainty” to a 5000sq km zone just north of the 120,000sq km area that yielded no clues in more than two years of searching.

CSIRO oceanographer David Griffin, the lead author of the new report, says the agency has identified three possible crash locations within that 5000sq km box. “We are talking about much smaller distances than we’ve ever talked before. The three locations that we nominated are of the highest priority,” he says.

The CSIRO’s language does not seem accidental.

The Australian, Malaysian and Chinese governments suspended their joint search in January after spending $180 million on a quest to locate the Malaysian Airlines plane that disappeared en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.

The three governments were unmoved last December when the CSIRO concluded, from drift analysis of debris and a re-evaluation of all evidence in the first principles review, that the plane most likely crashed in a 25,000sq km patch of ocean just north of the original search zone.

They seemed little more impressed when further drift analysis in April reaffirmed that conclusion.

They were unmoved again this week, despite evidence the CSIRO had narrowed the search zone to one-fifth of that area. Federal Transport Minister Darren Chester says the new analysis “does not provide new evidence leading to a specific ­location of MH370”.

Malaysian Deputy Transport Minister Aziz Kaprawi says his government has to evaluate the data as it is based on satellite im­ages from a few years ago.

That has infuriated the next of kin, who are desperate for answers. KS Narendran, whose wife Chandrika was on the flight, says the tripartite group’s insistence on a specific location has set “an impossible standard to meet”.

“It is almost as though they came up with this wording to scuttle any further search,” he tells ­Inquirer from Chennai. “They have elevated this whole argument about a precise location to a level of absurdity. I can’t imagine now what information would be so precise as to force them to act.”

Even the scientists are baffled. “I’m putting numbers on my definition of precise but we haven’t got numbers for the government’s definition,” Griffin says. “We are saying that the high priority area is 100km in one direction and 20 to 30km in another. I would describe that as precise compared with all earlier estimates, whereas the government’s definition of specifics is not expressed in kilometres.”

In the three years and five months since the search began, the area of focus for MH370 has shrunk significantly through science. The latest breakthrough is a result of methodical investigation of evidence as it washed up on distant shores: first a sheered piece of the plane’s flaperon on Reunion ­Island and then a large piece of the aircraft wing in Tanzania.

Using drift analysis to backtrack the origin of those two pieces led Griffin to conclude last December that mostly likely the plane had crashed just north of the original search area.

Suddenly, previously discarded information took on fresh significance, none more so than four low-resolution French satellite images gathered on March 23, 2014, that appear to show debris floating on the ocean surface. Questions have been raised this week as to why it took so long for scientists to evaluate these apparently critical images.

Griffin says investigators were “bombarded” after the plane’s disappearance with satellite images showing objects in the water near where it might have come down.

“Various vessels were sent out to find out what they were but they turned out to be pods of dolphins, waves, rubbish. They weren’t seen as very valuable clues, which is why they were discounted at the time,’’ he says.

“It’s really only been since December that all these clues started coming together. We had searched a large amount of sea floor and ruled it out, which left us with this 25,000sq km as being the only likely place left.

“Then the penny dropped that there were some images taken in the vicinity and maybe they’re not a red herring after all.”

Armed with fresh information, Geoscience Australia was asked to analyse the images in March and, after securing them in high resolution, concluded they showed at least 70 pieces of debris and that a dozen were likely to be man-made.

The resolution is not high enough to say the objects are debris from MH370. But Griffin’s analysis of where those objects came from matches the location identified in December and then April as the likeliest crash site.

Clues are finally consolidating

“It all fits together so perfectly,” Griffin says. “The only thing missing is proof that those actually are pieces of a plane.”

That is no small caveat. “If they are, then it’s a game changer because they show you the position of the debris of the aircraft only two weeks after the crash, whereas all the other work has been looking at the movement of debris across the whole ocean.

“The fact that they’re in a part of the ocean exactly where we predicted they would be goes in their favour as being parts of the plane. There are so many large white objects; if they’re not parts of the plane then what are they?”

Scientists have been wrong on MH370 before, and the mistake was costly to public treasuries and public confidence, but Griffin says it is unlikely any new debris will be found that can further narrow down the ­location of the plane. “People keep hoping finds on shores will help us pinpoint the ­location but I think it’s now too late for any additional findings to tell us a great deal,” he says.

David Mearns, the US-born oceanographer famous for having found the “unfindable” HMAS Sydney shipwreck in 2008 off the coast of Western Australia, says there is “no better qualified or better informed expert than David Griffin”. Griffin did much of the drift analysis that led Mearns to locate in a weekend the Australian navy cruiser whose location had been a mystery since it was downed in 1941 by German cruiser Kormoran, which also sank.

“You have to be cautious because if you go out there and gee everyone up and then you don’t find it there’s a huge loss of confidence and that may lead to the search being suspended again,” Mearns tells Inquirer.

“You can’t say 5000sq km pinpoints the wreckage. It still makes it one of the largest deep-water searches for a missing object ever. What if it’s in a 6000sq km area? This is a very small object in very deep water (up to 5000m) in a remote part of the world.

“We are talking months rather than years of effort to search 5000sq km. And it is unacceptable for that plane not to be found.”

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s final report on MH370 is due out next month, and Mearns says “it is logical to conclude there will be a strong recommendation to resume the search in the area Griffin is talking about”. The ATSB is giving no hints as to its conclusions and to whether it will even make recommendations on whether to resume the search.

The decision rests with ­Malaysia, which has final legal authority as the plane’s country of origin, but it has shown little interest in resuming the search. It is weighing up a proposal from a British mapping and surveying company, Ocean Infinity, which has offered to search on a “no find, no fee” basis.

Mearns says new “swarm search” technology the company employs, using up to five autonomous underwater vessels from a single mother ship to scour the seabed, is “first rate” and up to six times as productive as older technology. It could slash the search time to less than two months. But the window is closing, given the weather improves around late October, then deteriorates from March.

Ocean Infinity’s Oliver Plunkett tells Inquirer he is hopeful the Malaysian government will take up his offer.

If it does not, and the tripartite group again chooses to do nothing, Mearns says he will help MH370 families raise the money to conduct an independent search.