It’s been six and a half years since Malaysian
Airlines MH370 disappeared on route from Kuala
Lumpur to Beijing, China with the presumed
loss of all 239 onboard. And yet despite the
most expensive air and sea search in aviation
history and launching a whole raft of conspiracy
theories, only a few fragments of the plane
have been discovered thousands of kilometres
away on the other side of the Indian ocean
but aircraft's actual location is still a
mystery. So considering the all effort that
has gone in the recovery mission and the research
into all the things we have found out since,
why can’t we find MH370.
This video is sponsored by Brilliant
The loss of MH370 has become the biggest mystery
in aviation history since the disappearance
of Emelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan
in the central pacific whilst trying to circumnavigate
the globe in July 1937.
But whereas Earhart’s disappearance has
been thought of as a tragic accident, the
loss of MH370 has boiled down to two possible
outcomes. Firstly, something happened to the
crew that incapacitated them and the plane
flew on by itself until it ran out of fuel
and crashed into the sea soon after, how it
ended up in the Indian ocean when it was flying
north to China still isn’t explained by
this scenario.
The second is that someone on board took control
of the aircraft and deliberately flew it to
a remote part of the Indian ocean and ditched
the plane.
Either of these outcomes is disconcerting.
If the crew were incapacitated and the plane
was left to fly by itself then it would be
imperative to find the try and find the cause.
If however, it was a case of hijacking or
pilot suicide and the murder of all on board,
then the ramifications would be also worse
for Malaysia as a whole. To many Malaysians,
it's almost unthinkable that a well-respected
pilot of the national flag carrier could do
such a thing and in an Asian culture loss
of face is one of the worst things that can
happen.
This highlights the problem that MH370 poses,
we just don’t know where it went down, but
to find it we need to know where it was in
its final few hours.
Based on the evidence so far, it’s believed
to be somewhere in the southern Indian ocean
around an area defined by a set of radio messages
sent from a maintenance system that was never
in any way designed to be a location device
and assuming it flew at altitude until it
ran out of fuel.
Because there was no direct GPS tracking data
sent from the aircraft, it’s final course
and location had to be reconstituted from
data picked up by the Inmarsat Satellite which
received hourly maintenance broadcasts from
the planes ACARS datalink system. In the time
from the receiving of the last transmission
to the crash which could have been anything
from a few minutes to almost an hour, the
aircraft could have flown on for hundreds
of kilometres.
By comparing the timing delay from the ACARS
system to it arriving at the satellite situated
over the Indian ocean, the Inmarsat engineers
were able to determine a possible route along
the so-called 7th arc that stretched from
central Asia in the north to the southern
oceans in the south and passing about 2000km
west of Perth, Australia.
Ruling out the northern path due to lack of
radar evidence from the countries that it
would have to have flown over, left the southern
route as the most probable. The data pings
also continued for a further six hours after
military radar lost contact over Indonesia,
meaning that it must have been in the air
and operational during this time.
The issue of how MH370 ended up in the sea
also has a major impact on where the wreckage
is likely to be. If the aircraft was flying
at a high altitude on autopilot without a
crew and ran out of fuel then it's likely
to have ended up in a high-speed dive. In
similar accidents like the 1998 crash of Swissair
111 into the Atlantic, the effect of the high-speed
impact with the sea resulted in the plane
breaking up into over 2 million pieces.
If MH370 did the same, then there would very
few large pieces left to float away and the
distance travelled from the time the engines
flamed out to hitting the sea would have been
quite short. In simulator tests, it was thought
that it could have been up to about 37km.
If however, the plane was in a pilot controlled
glide from the point of running out of fuel
to making a controlled landing in the sea
relatively intact, simulator tests showed
the distance could be upto 130km. But this
is assuming the pilot waited until it ran
of fuel, he could have just ditched the plane
whilst it was still under power before the
fuel ran out to give the greatest chance of
keeping the aircraft intact but either of
these scenarios could place it a considerable
distance from the initial search area.
By analysing the Inmarsat data and knowing
the amount of fuel the aircraft was carrying,
a search area of approximately 1,120,000 Km2
was defined, this was later prioritised down
to 120,000 km2.
From 18th March to 29th April 2014, 21 aircraft
flew 345 flights with a combined flight time
of over 3,177 hours together with 19 ships
from 8 countries.
The initial belief by the ATSB, the Australian
Transport Safety Board was that the crew had
been incapacitated by a hypoxia event like
a sudden decompression and the plane had flown
on autopilot until the engines flamed out
due to lack of fuel. But this still had to
take on a lot of assumptions such as flying
in a straight line and at altitude, either
of which could be wrong and could make a huge
difference to where it really is.
But this scenario defined the initial search
area which has been subject to underwater
sonar scans in 2014 and has been the basis
for all the subsequent searches.
However, investigators in the US and Europe
believe the evidence points towards a manual
control takeover of the aircraft to fly it
into the southern Indian Ocean, an area renowned
for rough seas, high winds and deep ocean
floors, as the Australian prime minister Tony
Abbot said its "as close to nowhere as it's
possible to be".
Part of this conclusion comes from the course
the aircraft took shortly after the last verbal
communication and what happened next. All
the data transmissions from the aircraft were
suddenly lost along with all communications,
pointing to someone turning off the main electrical
power systems and then relying on up the emergency
Ram Air Turbine to provide enough power to
just fly the aircraft and keeping a very careful
and well thought out course following the
Thai - Malaysian border into straits of Malacca
before turning towards the southern oceans.
This was done very carefully to avoid other
aircraft and raising concerns of the multiple
civilian and military Air traffic Controllers
in the area. Once it was in the Indian ocean
and out of Indonesian radar range, power seems
to have been partially re-instated as the
ACARS system started working again.
This scenario was added to 16 months later
with the discovery of an almost intact starboard
flaperon, something which crash investigators
say would have been ripped apart by a high-speed
impact with the sea. This was based on previous
high-speed impacts like the Swissair 111 and
computer modelling of how the flaperon would
have reacted in varying crash scenarios.
The flaperon was also damaged in such a way
as to indicate that it was extended at the
time, something which would only have been
done during a pilot controlled landing and
if the aircraft had power. Only the trailing
edge was eroded which suggests this was caused
by it hitting into the sea during a ditching
of the aircraft.
Then there was the discovery a flight path
found on a computer flight simulator at the
home of the pilot which followed a very similar
path ending up in the approximate area of
where its believed to have disappeared. There
were about 1000 other flight paths found on
the simulator but only one where the destination
was the southern ocean, well away from any
possible place to land safely.
32 pieces of debris have been found that could
be linked to MH370 but only 3 have been positively
identified. All these have been found on coasts
thousands of km’s away on the other side
of the Indian ocean which is pretty much where
they were expected to be knowing the how currents
flow around the from east to west.
No pieces have been on found the Australian
coast even though it much closer to the presumed
crash site than where they ended up. Experts
say this proves it had to have come down in
an area where the ocean current flows away
from Australia and over to the western Indian
ocean.
But whether that was much farther north or
south of the ATSBs estimate remains unknown.
The barnacle growth found on the Flaperon
would only have occurred if it had been in
the warm waters farther north for an extended
period of time, leading some at the Royal
Aeronautical Society to suggest that it could
have been trying to land at Christmas Island
but ran out of fuel due to flying at a much
lower altitude of 5000 feet and slower speed
since leaving the straights of Malaca rather
than on to the Southern Indian Ocean. This
is based on their extensive and exclusive
investigation of the air traffic control responses
from all those countries involved and the
unusual course it took during the first part
of the flight up until all radar contact was
lost and it entering the Indian ocean.
But backtracking the debris from their final
position to try and locate where they entered
the ocean years earlier is a very imprecise
science that can only give a general area
over such long timespans but it doesn’t
rule out a more northerly or southerly crash
location.
During the initial search and to direct submersible
vehicles close to the seafloor to take a closer
look, high-resolution images of the ocean
topography were required not only to know
where they are going but also to know how
deep they were. In the initial aftermath,
some remote subs were sent to below there
design depth simply because of the poor accuracy
of the existing maps.
Although we have maps of all the ocean floors,
most of these come from gravitational maps
created from satellite data which have a resolution
of about 2km per pixel. Greater accuracy of
300 meters per pixel is available from satellite
mounted radar altimeters but this is still
far too low resolution to find even the largest
parts of an aircraft a few 10s of meters in
size.
Due to the remoteness, bad weather and lack
of commercial interest in the southern oceans
there has been very little in the way of high-resolution
mapping done. What we do know is that the
rugged ocean terrain in this area could easily
hide an object like an aircraft even one the
size of a Boeing 777.
To find something as small as an aircraft
especially if it has broken up into smaller
pieces requires high-resolution scanning equipment
such as side-scanning and multibeam sonar.
In the search, these were towed behind ships
which travelled 24/7 across the search area.
As the image data was coming in live, anything
found that could be of interest was marked
so autonomous submersibles could be sent down
to investigate.
Although the underwater survey revealed a
huge amount about the ocean floor in the area
of the search, nothing from MH370 was found
and the joint Malay, Chinese and Australian
search was eventually wound up in January
2017.
In Oct 2017 the company Ocean Infinity offered
to search for MH370 on a “no find, no fee”
basis for the Malaysian government on the
next most likely area based on the drift analysis
conducted by CISRO the Australian national
science agency. This new search area is a
bit farther south and based on the ocean currents
which travel towards Africa where all the
existing wreckage was found.
In 2018, using the vessel “Seabed Constructor”
and its eight Autonomous Underwater Vehicles,
Ocean Infinity searched 120,000 km2 over 3
months, discovering more about the ocean floor
and several shipwrecks at a depth of 3700
to 3900 meters dating back to the 19th century
but again no sign of the missing plane.
And this is where we currently are, so could
we find MH370 if we really tried, I certainly
think so, we have already ruled out certain
areas so we know where it isn’t. We could
start searching to the north where the Royal
Aeronautical Society think it is or to the
south where the US investigators think it
maybe but either way this is a very large
area and there is still no guarantee.
So the sticking point now seems to be money,
Malaysia is happy for third parties to restart
the search on limited areas but only on a
“no find, no fee” basis so there will
be no blank cheques to look for it until found.
$200 million has already been spent on the
search so far, making it the most expensive
in aviation history. The 2018 search by Ocean
Infinity would have cost the Malaysian government
$70 million if they had found the aircraft.
So working on that basis to produce a high-resolution
search of a million square km would cost about
in the region of maybe about $500M and take
a couple of years if other ships were to join
in the search.
If we really wanted to find MH370 come what
may, and you had to perform a high-resolution
search of a large chunk of the eastern Indian
Ocean west of Australia before locating it,
several billion might be needed but I wouldn’t
place any bets on that happening anytime soon
unless a benevolent billionaire decides to
pitch in with some funding.
If MH370 is in the sea, then the only way
we will find it in the deep ocean is with
advanced sonar but this is a slow process
with each sonar unit only able to travel at
around 4 km/h. In recent years, advances in
AUV’s or Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
has allowed multiple units to work together
as a group covering a much greater area in
the same time, essential for large searches
like for MH370.
These advances need skilled technicians not
only to develop them but also operate them
and one way you can build up your skills is
to use something like Brilliant, the sponsors
of this video.
Brilliant is a problem-solving website and
app so you're not tied to the desktop and
you can help develop those learning skills
anywhere. Basically, brilliant breaks down
complex problems into small easily understandable
parts before putting them back together to
show the overall conclusion.
There are loads of great interactive courses
and daily challenges covering everything math
and logic to quantum objects and computer
science and loads of other things in between.
This hands-on active learning approach is
great for all those curious minds you who
want to understand the world.
If you want to support Curious Droid and get
unlimited access to all of Brilliant's in-depth
courses and learning, head over to brilliant.org/curiousdroid/
to get 20% off their annual Premium subscription.
So just to rounds things off, I would just
to say thank you to all our patroens and their
ongoing support.
