Basically, the findings of a group of scientists who call themselves the Independent Group show that the authorities have been searching in all the wrong places.
This news adds to the host of speculations and theories about MH370 which took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport, bound for Beijing, with 227 passengers and 12 crew on March 8, 2014, and seemingly vanished into thin air.
The search for MH370, costing US$160 million (RM695 million), is the most expensive in aviation history but it has not yielded results. The search for the Boeing 777 was suspended in January this year.
Britain’s The Independent reported yesterday that last Sunday a loose affiliation of interested scientists calling themselves the Independent Group revealed a drift analysis conducted by Richard Godfrey.
It suggested that the wreck of MH370 might lie around latitude 30°S, farther away than the place where the search had taken place.
Godfrey, a Frankfurt-based aerospace engineer, asked if it wasn’t possible that something could have washed up unnoticed somewhere along the 20,781km of the relatively sparsely populated coast of western Australia.
Godfrey, the Independent reported, disagreed with the findings of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) on where the new search should be conducted.
He was quoted as saying: “An MH370 End Point at 35°S does not fit the fact that the underwater search has already discounted this location to a 97% level of certainty.”
CSIRO, which had also suggested recently that the authorities had been searching in the wrong place, had said the wreck of the bulk of the plane was probably in a region near 35°S. It recommended examining this new area, north of where the search had earlier been done.
Since November 2015 the authorities had searched an area in the southern Indian Ocean between the latitudes 36°S and 39.3°S.
CSIRO had based its findings on the first piece of MH370 debris to be found: a flaperon, an aircraft wing part functioning as both flaps and ailerons, that drifted across the ocean until it was found in July 2015 on a beach on the island of Réunion, east of Madagascar.
The Independent reported that the resulting drift patterns and the fact that so far MH370 debris had been found on Réunion, Madagascan and African shores but not on Australian beaches led CSIRO to conclude: “The region near 35°S is the only one that is consistent. The available evidence suggests that all other regions are unlikely.”
The Independent said these findings would only add to the conspiracy theories that had been making the rounds in the early months of MH370’s disappearance – ranging from a secret landing on the US airbase of Diego Garcia, to the world’s first remote-controlled “cyberhijack”.
The report suggested that part of the problem lay in the confusion that followed the plane’s disappearance and the manner in which the Malaysian authorities initially handled it.
In the meantime, everyone will have to keep wondering how a large, sophisticated, safe jetliner could just disappear.