Those hunting for MH370 worry they have been looking in the wrong place

By B.R.

IN MARCH, Martin Dolan, the Australian coordinating the search for Malaysia Airlines flight 370, which disappeared from the skies without trace two years earlier, said that he expected the plane to be found “by July”. Today Fugro, the firm leading that hunt, said that it now believes it may have been searching in the wrong place all along.

Contact with MH370 was lost around an hour into a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The Boeing 777 was carrying 239 passengers and crew. Its last recorded position was close to Phuket, a Thai island. The scale of the task facing the recovery team was always daunting. The search area had been narrowed down to some 120,000 square kilometres of the Indian Ocean (see map), where depths reach three miles and the pressure is a mind-boggling 6,680 psi. Moreover, the topography of that piece of ocean floor had barely been charted.

And yet, through a process of elimination, the search team believed it was slowly homing in on the jet's resting place. Now engineers at Fugro have wondered aloud whether the plane might have glided to its final position, rather than plummeting out of the sky as had previously been assumed. That would presuppose that the plane was being piloted almost to the last. But given the distance a jet plane can glide, it would take the range of the search well beyond the area currently being scoured. “If it’s not there, it means it’s somewhere else,” runs the infallible logic of Paul Kennedy, boss of Furgo.

As Reuters reports, there will now be calls for the search teams to hand over their data to other firms and academics, who may have better luck at modelling MH370s final hours. The news agency adds:

Fugro’s controlled glide hypothesis is also the first time officials have leant some support to contested theories that someone was in control during the flight’s final moments.

Since the crash there have been competing theories over whether one, both or no pilots were in control, whether it was hijacked—or whether all aboard perished and the plane was not controlled at all when it hit the water. Adding to the mystery, investigators believe someone may have deliberately switched off the plane’s transponder before diverting it thousands of miles.

Such unexplained tragedies will always attract the attention of conspiracy theorists, of course. But whatever the truth about MH370's fate, with each glimmer of hope—such as when remnants of the plane washed up on the Indian Ocean island Réunion last year—which is then subsequently dashed, one can only pity the relatives and friends of those doomed 239 who boarded the flight in Kuala Lumpur two years ago.