It’s been 28 months since the disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. After spending over A$180 million, the events of this flight remain the greatest aviation mystery. The search for the crash site has still not given any concrete result.
The Australian government has been working closely with the Malaysian and Chinese and have deployed a massive search effort covering 120,000 square kilometers in the Indian Ocean, west of Australia.
The search has come down to the last 10,000 square kilometers, and this has got the ministries in the three countries concerned. There appears to be a good chance that no information is going to be found on the last leg of the search operation. The ministries in Australia, Malaysia and China have decided to suspend the search operation temporarily until some “credible” information surfaces.
As reported by The News Minutes, Flight MH370 was traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew members when it disappeared on 8th March 2014. The ATS informed that the flight had diverted from its usual path, and the satellite information about its flight path makes it evident that the flight ended in the southeast Indian Ocean.
The FBI claimed that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah had caused the Flight MH370 to disappear following a tendency for murder-suicide. The FBI have gone through the home flight simulator of the Captain and there they found the same routine that he had taken that day.
This aspect has been denied by the Malaysian authorities, as reported by The Week. Khalid Abu Bakar, the national police head of Malaysia has come out to reveal that no official document or information had been handed to the FBI or any other foreign body for investigation.
However, Australian Transport Safety Bureau had confirmed that the FBI did examine the personal simulator at the Captain’s home and did find the southern Indian Ocean that the Flight MH370 is believed to have gone before it disappeared. However, this doesn’t indicate that the disappearance was a murder-suicide.
Seven pings had originated from the aircraft engines, and the last sound was recorded at 00.19 UTC. The location of the arc has been made the area where the search operation has been deployed. For weeks after 8th March 2014 the area around the arcs, which became the potential spot for the crash, were combed extensively by aircraft and ships, but no surface debris was visible.
The first glimmer of hope came on 29th July 2015 when a section of Flight MH370 washed up on Reunion Island. Once the flaperon was discovered the search operation was intensified, and it resulted in numerous other portions of the Flight MH370 being gathered in different countries bordering the Indian Ocean. The shorelines of South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania and Madagascar were getting debris washed up on their shores.
Scientists were brought in to make a model prediction based on oceanographic processes and drift modeling. US lawyer and investigator Blaine Gibson said that the surface winds follow a particular pattern, which causes a large gyre in the ocean basin.
This is a large part of the circular ocean currents and moves in an anticlockwise direction in the southern Indian Ocean.
This model has helped the rescue operation understand that the debris that is in the southwest portion of the ocean was going to head north initially. Then when it joined the east-west currents there, it ultimately comes into the path of the south equatorial current in the west of the Indian Ocean.