There’s still no sign of the plane with 239 people on board, the luggage or even the lifejackets that were supposed to float.
KUALA LUMPUR: After spending USD130 million and scouring 120,000 square kilometres of the southern Indian Ocean, the hunt for the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 only turned up one item, a wing flap found on Reunion Island in the western Indian Ocean, said Bloomberg in a curtain-raiser on the hunt coming to an end soon.
The missing Boeing 777 aircraft had 3 million components and the search turned up 20 petabytes of information, the equivalent of 20 million gigabytes, enough to house the entire digital collection of the US Library of Congress several times over.
Yet, there’s still no sign of the plane with 239 people on board, the luggage or even the lifejackets that were supposed to float.
MH370, said Bloomberg, was weeks away from becoming aviation’s biggest unsolved mystery since Amelia Earhart disappeared in 1937.
Martin Dolan, 58, head of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau who spearheads the search, suspects that the plane may have somehow slipped through the sonar net scanning 120,000 square kilometres of the southern Indian Ocean. “Have we missed something? That’s the sort of thing that keeps me awake sometimes at nights.”
“We are ready for most things but MH370 has been unpredictable all the way. It’s a possibility that we will not succeed.”
The search by four ships is due to end in June with all indications that it has been an exercise in futility so far and that it may end in failure. Ships are re-checking 100 hotspots which are likely to contain the missing aircraft, according to Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Group, a government agency on national security.
“I won’t be surprised if they don’t find it,” said Larry Stone, chief scientist at Reston, a Virginia-based consultant. He found the resting place of Air France Flight 447 two years after it plunged into the Atlantic Ocean with 228 people on board in 2009.
Flight MH370 went missing, less than an hour after takeoff, during a routine flight on 8 March 2014 between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing. Military radar showed that the plane turned back just short of Vietnam, headed across the peninsular and headed northwest up the Straits of Melaka. It’s believed to have headed south over the Indian Ocean where it apparently glided to a crash after running out of fuel.
-FMT NEWS-
Post a Comment