MH370 investigators probe 1,000 'possible' flight paths
With the underwater hunt for MH370 set to restart, the mission's Australian chief says he does not want to create 'false hope' but believes the plane can be found
By Tom Phillips, Shanghai
1:00PM BST 07 Sep 2014
Six months after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 the man leading the operation to find it has admitted investigators are still having to consider 1,000 possible flight paths it may have taken before crashing into the southern Indian Ocean.
Martin Dolan, the chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is coordinating the search, said his team faced an "intimidating" and "unprecedented" challenge as it prepared to launch a one-year offshore search operation that could cost up to £29.5 million.
The only near certainty was that Flight 370 had gone down in a remote and inhospitable expanse of ocean that, at nearly 618,000 sq miles, is more than three times the size of Spain.
Asked if he could guarantee that the plane's wreckage would be found, Mr Dolan told The Telegraph: "I'd like to be that confident, but this is unprecedented.
"I don't want to raise the hopes of the families of the people who were lost in this accident and then dash them again. I don't want to create a false hope.
"But I don't want them to write it off either, because we do think we have a reasonable prospect. We just don't have a guarantee."
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared in the early hours of March 8 as it flew from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. There were 227 passengers and 12 crew on board the Boeing 777.
Despite a massive multi-national search stretching from the Gulf of Thailand to the Bay of Bengal and, finally, the Indian Ocean, no trace of the plane, or even its black box, has been found. Following several false leads, an underwater search was suspended in late May while Australian and Chinese survey vessels built a map of the almost entirely unexplored depths of the Indian Ocean.
Now, six months after the biggest mystery in modern aviation history began, the search is about to recommence, with Australia and Malaysia recently agreeing to split a bill that could rise to A$52 million (£29.5 million). China, which had 153 citizens on the plane, is "reflecting" on what its role in operations [is]and will play no immediate part.
The search, which has been contracted out to Fugro, a Dutch engineering firm that provides services to oil and gas companies, will see three vessels deployed over the coming weeks, according to the ATSB chief.
- In the week beginning Sept 22 a vessel called Go Phoenix, which has been hired by the Malaysian government, will kick off the operation. It will use "next generation sonar synthetic aperture" equipment that is capable of producing a high-resolution image of the sea bed, Mr Dolan said.
- In the week beginning Oct 13, the Fugro Discovery survey vessel, which had been operating out of Aberdeen, is expected to join the mission.
- Finally, in early November, a third vessel, the Fugro Equator, should arrive. Both Fugro vessels will use underwater "deep tow" instruments that can be lowered close to the sea bed on protective armoured cables, and should enable search teams to see what is down there.
Simultaneously, an international team of experts and analysts from nations including the United Kingdom, Australia and France will continue to analyse "the backside off" data obtained from the flight's satellite communications and flight simulations to try to further narrow the priority search areas, Mr Dolan added.
Investigators have for months been convinced the plane crashed into the southern Indian Ocean, somewhere along a 2,485-mile (4,000km) curve known as the "seventh arc".
"We know that the aircraft is in the water or on the sea floor close to that arc, and we are doing everything we can - which is a lot - to make sure we find it there," said Mr Dolan.
However, analysts had still not been able to pinpoint precisely where along that curve Flight 370 ended.
"At one point we had them all more or less agreeing on the same area. We are now finding with the slight change in the assumptions about the data that we can't get full agreement. So we are going to have possibly two areas of primary focus," Mr Dolan said.
It was now considered a certainty that the plane crashed somewhere within a 618,000 sq mile area around the seventh arc. But that area was far too big to be "practically searchable" and even a vastly reduced priority area posed an enormous challenge, Mr Dolan admitted.
A narrowed down search area of around 23,000 sq miles (60,000 sq km) had in recent weeks increased to a "range of priority areas" totalling around 38,610 sq miles (100,000 sq km), he said. Teams would examine a series of "hard" objects detected on the ocean floor during the mapping process but Mr Dolan said they appeared to be geological formations rather than anything related to Flight 370.
"We haven't seen anything that very clearly looks like aircraft wreckage or wreckage of any sort."
While the techniques being used to try and find the plane were not new, "the scale on which we are doing them it is unprecedented and the terrain as we are mapping it is quite complex", he said. In some places the water is close to 20,000ft deep.
"There are mountains, crevasses, extinct volcanoes, sheer cliffs and various other things which will make it slower and more complicated."
And he pointed out that the location of the crash site of Air France Flight 447, which plunged into the Atlantic, was known to within a comparatively small area, yet "it still took two years to find it".
The wreckage would only be found if the governments bank-rolling the hugely expensive and time-consuming search stayed the course, Mr Dolan warned.
"Nominally, it can go on forever until you have eliminated everything. But, with the sort of area we are talking about, there will come a point I would assume where the governments say, 'It is good money after bad and we no longer wish to continue.'
"
But that is a matter for government. I am not making that decision. I know that the Australian government has given me a significant amount of money and the Malaysians have agreed to match it.
"In the areas we look we are confident that if it is there we will find it but there is no absolute guarantee that we will be able to cover all the possible areas."
Investigators believe Flight 370 changed course as a result of a "deliberate act" but appear to have reached a dead-end in trying to discover who provoked its mysterious disappearance.
The lack of answers has left many families clinging to conspiracy theories. However, Mr Dolan argued that a "reasonably clear picture" of the plane's final trajectory was starting to emerge, even if there were still approximately 1,000 possible paths it could have taken within the seventh arc.
"There is an infinite possible number of tracks that the aircraft could have flown along, but for practical purposes there are about 1,000... from the point of its turning south," he said.
The first areas to be searched at the end of this month would be those related to the "highest probability tracks".
Mr Dolan described the task ahead as "intimidating but also revitalising".
"This is what we are here for: to try and help solve these problems, to find the answers," he said.
"As a father - as someone with a family that I love very much - I try and understand the tragic elements of this: the 239 who are missing as a result of this event. I think that the best thing that I can do in that circumstance is to at least try and solve the mystery and give some certainty."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... paths.html
