In Shadow of New Search, a Long Aviation Mystery Remains Unsolved
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Version 0 of 1. KATOOMBA, Australia — The sudden disappearance of AirAsia Flight 8501 and the search in the waters of Southeast Asia have brought to mind one of the greatest aviation mysteries of modern times: the vanishing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on March 8 with 239 passengers and crew aboard. The Australian government still has two ships under contract to search an area of seafloor the size of Nebraska in the Indian Ocean, and the Malaysian government has a third. A series of separate analyses last spring and summer by satellite companies and others of the final satellite pings from Flight 370 each concluded that the plane most likely ran out of fuel and went into a steep dive into the ocean southwest of Perth. “We remain confident that we will find the missing aircraft in that search area, but obviously because it is about probability, we can’t give an absolute guarantee,” Martin Dolan, the chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, said Monday morning in a telephone interview. The largest of the three ships, the Fugro Equator, recently completed a comprehensive mapping of the deep ocean seafloor in the 80,000 square miles where the authorities believe the plane’s wreckage is likely to lie. The mapping was needed so that deep-sea submersibles with special sonar can be towed close to the ocean floor with little risk of crashing into unexpected cliffs and other hazards. The Fugro Equator returned to the Australian port of Fremantle last Monday to replace mapping equipment with equipment for searching and will soon leave again for the search area, according to a statement Tuesday by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau. Two slightly smaller but similarly capable vessels, the Fugro Discovery and the GO Phoenix, remained in the southern Indian Ocean through Christmas as they continued the search. The two Fugro vessels are under Australian contracts, while Malaysia dispatched the GO Phoenix. About 4,600 square miles of the ocean floor have already been searched comprehensively with deep-sea towed submersibles, and no trace has been found of the Malaysia Airlines plane. Flight 370 took off shortly after midnight on March 8 from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for what was supposed to be a six-hour flight to Beijing. But the plane did a U-turn over the South China Sea between Malaysia and Vietnam, and communications with the cockpit ceased. The aircraft’s engines continued to send an automated ping to a satellite over the Indian Ocean. Malaysian Air Force radar tracked the plane as it flew back over Peninsular Malaysia, then headed northwest on a course that would take it slightly north of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Subsequent analyses of the satellite pings indicated that the aircraft made another turn soon after it passed Sumatra and headed straight south or almost straight south until it ran out of fuel. One of the questions confounding the Australian search has been whether anyone was still conscious and at the controls at that point. Safety investigators believe a plane on autopilot would have quickly fallen into the sea after running out of fuel, and have based their search on that assumption. But a conscious pilot could have guided the plane on a glide of up to 100 miles in an unknown direction, which could have resulted in a crash outside the area where the three ships are searching. |