‘Doomed to fail’: New twist in MH370 search

A former Australian naval officer revealed the political and bureaucratic chaos that plagued the failed search, and the likely location of the ocean floor where the wreckage remains.

A former Australian naval officer who searched for MH370 revealed the “political and bureaucratic” chaos that doomed the mission to fail, and the likely location of the wreckage on the ocean floor.

Survey and sea floor mapping expert Peter Waring, who was part of the Australian Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) in 2014, said they never searched the correct area due to a fundamental error in modelling.

He said the location of the wreckage was much further south than previously thought, but that the search team’s success was measured on how much ocean floor they scoured rather than if they were looking in the right spot.

“There was a whole lot wasted effort looking in the wrong areas,” Waring told The Sun in a bombshell interview.

Re-enactment/artist impression of final moments of MH370 flight. Picture: National Geographic

Waring said he discussed the hypothesis, that the wreckage was much further south than the search area, with specialists in Canberra at the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB).

“I think we may have gone wrong with the assumption that the aircraft wasn’t under control at the end,” he said.

“We were taking this quite seriously during the search, that the aircraft may have continued to be under control in one form or another after it crossed the 7th arc.

Search area for missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 on March 20, 2014. Picture: Getty Images)

“Once that had happened that means that the aircraft was probably further south.

“ … if the aircraft was still under control at the seventh arc then the size of the Indian Ocean they could of reached is so unimaginably large that you wouldn’t have been able to afford to search it all.

Waring left the search team in September 2015, when it was clear that the search area would not change no matter what new evidence was presented.

While experts suggest the plane was ditched on the “seventh arc”, Waring believes the theory that “suicidal” pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah flew the jet more than 50 miles southwest of the previous search area and ditched over the Geelvinck Fracture Zone.

Estimated MH370 flight path, with the island of Sumatra in the top right. Picture: Supplied

The trench is a half mile deep and seven miles wide, and Waring believes Shah, who is thought to have carried out a flight simulation to the area a month earlier, deliberately downed the aircraft in a controlled ditch to limit the debris field and hide the wreckage forever.

The theory was first proposed by Boeing 777 pilot Simon Hardy, who used Immarsat data and his expertise on Boeing 777 performance to reverse engineer the plane’s flight path and pinpoint its likely location on the ocean floor.

Waring said it was “blatantly clear” to people involved in the search that they were looking in the wrong place, but that politicians wanted a “clean nice neat box” that was never re-evaluated after new evidence arose.

“On the one hand, It was a slow-moving bureaucratic political process that wanted something really easy and neat which was a box drawn on a map,” he said.

An expert believe the flight was put into a controlled ditch to minimise the debris field. Picture: The Sun

“On the other hand you had one of the most complex mysteries that’s ever occurred and the amount of information was so scarce, so to try and create something out of nothing was really difficult.

“There was a lot of political pressure to have milestones, part of my job was to report each day on how much of the search area had been covered the previous day.

“The metric of success was only how much of that box we had completed, not if the box was in the right place to begin with.”

– With The Sun

Originally published as ‘Doomed to fail’: New twist in MH370 search