Failure to Find MH370 Leaves Critical Questions Unanswered

The search for MH370 has been conducted along an arc to the southwest of Australia. The area measures 120,000 square kilometers. (Photo: ATSB)

The abandonment of the search last week for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean leaves all sorts of critical questions unanswered and represents an almost unprecedented failure to provide a meaningful explanation for such a serious incident. For the families of the 239 passengers and crew who lost their lives when the Boeing 777-200ER went missing on March 8, 2014, it comes as a bitter disappointment as they wrestle with the real prospect of never knowing the true cause of the tragedy.

Transport authorities in Malaysia, China and Australia cited the absence of “credible new evidence leading to the identification of a specific location of the aircraft” for their January 17 decision to abandon the search. However, new evidence did coincidentally emerge only a few weeks before the decision to suspend the search. The confidential Malaysian police report into the incident, which includes an analysis of data from the flight simulator removed from MH370 Captain Zahari’s home, was leaked to French media. The data includes a flight path that leads to the southern Indian Ocean, with six waypoints charted, with altitudes and fuel states. Although the existence of the flight path was leaked to Malaysian media in 2014, such level of detail did not then emerge. The police report noted that the flight path was one of many recovered from Zahari’s personal flight simulator, and determined that they could glean “no conclusive information” about the cause of the flight’s disappearance from the analysis.

The Malaysian government apparently never shared the police report with the Australian Transportation Safety Board (ATSB), which has led the search for MH370. Yet the flight path revealed on Zahari’s simulator is not exactly the same as that calculated by the Inmarsat satellite “handshakes,” plus two unanswered ground-to-air telephone calls used to define the search area in the southern Indian Ocean. After a review conducted in early November of the satellite data plus aircraft dynamics, meteorological data and a drift analysis prompted by the discovery of more than 20 pieces of wreckage in the western Indian Ocean, the ATSB already narrowed the most likely impact location to a 25,000-square-kilometer area farther north. The review expressed a high level of confidence that the current search could not have missed an aircraft debris field.

According to Don Thompson of The Independent Group, a collaborative volunteer group of scientists and engineers, the debris field might lie even farther north than the area specified by the ATSB’s recent review. He told AIN that it all depends on the point in the Straits of Malacca at which the aircraft turned south–a coordinate experts can calculate from satcom communications using different assumptions.

“We remain hopeful that new information will come to light and that at some point in the future the aircraft will be located,” the three transport ministers said in their January 17 statement. But when and how the investigation might ever resume remains very much in question for now.