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from the it's-always-in-the-last-place-you-look dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
International investigators hunting for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 have admitted after combing the Indian Ocean for two years search crews were likely looking in the wrong place.
Tuesday's conclusion raises the possibility the search for the Boeing 777 could continue well beyond next month, when crews are expected to finish their deep sea sonar hunt of the current search zone west of Australia.
Australia's transport minister, however, suggested that was doubtful.
The latest analysis of the plane's whereabouts comes in a report from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is leading the search for the aircraft.
The report is the result of a November meeting of international and Australian experts who re-examined all the data used to narrow down the search area for the plane, which vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board.
In the years since the plane disappeared, experts have analysed a series of exchanges between the aircraft and a satellite to estimate a probable crash site along what's known as the seventh arc - a vast arc of ocean that runs through the southern hemisphere. A deep sea search of a 120,000sq km stretch of water along the seventh arc has so far come up empty.
In November, the experts went back over the satellite data, along with the results of a new ocean drift analysis of the more than 20 items of debris likely to have come from the plane that have washed ashore on beaches throughout the Indian Ocean. The analysis, which looked at where the items washed ashore and when, suggested the debris originated in an area farther north along the arc from the current search zone.
Given the number of aircraft parts found so far, the team concluded there must have been a debris field floating on the surface of the water when the plane crashed. So they eliminated an area that had already been the subject of a surface search by air crews in the early stages of the hunt.
That left a 25,000-square kilometre area immediately to the north of the current search zone as the most likely place where the plane hit the ocean, the ATSB report said.
The investigators concluded there is "a high degree of confidence" the plane is not in the current search area and they agreed the new area needs to be searched.
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Thursday December 29 2016, @08:48PM
I understand that these sorts of horrible accidents are painful for relatives and that government agencies have a genuine need to gather debris to figure out what happened. But by now, the cost for this search has probably grown into the millions of dollars. How much is that data worth after all this time? How much effort does a country need to put out in the name of "closure"?
That is all.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday December 29 2016, @09:06PM
It's more than simple closure. A lot of people, nations, and companies have stakes in an airplane, particularly a big one. Big planes are behemoths, not just technologically, or economically, but also politically.
For a sample of the kinds of entities involved: You've got the airline and its contractors, the manufacturers and various factories involved (separate ones for the various airframe parts, engines, computers, etc), any organizations tracking the plane, the government of the country the plane originated in, the government of the country it was headed to, the governments of the countries it crashed in/near, every government of a country a passenger or crew on board was a citizen of, the families of each passenger or crew, national and international regulation organizations... that's just a taste, without naming names or following down the chains and links.
Even if some of them are fine with letting it lie, you can bet some of those interests with serious money will be involved and will not be okay with letting it lie, whether for pride, blame, insurance, research, or who knows what else. Part of why big planes don't crash much is so many people wanting very much for it to not happen and being willing to go that far to make sure it doesn't.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Thursday December 29 2016, @10:40PM
A lot of people, nations, and companies have stakes in an airplane, particularly a big one. Big planes are behemoths, not just technologically, or economically, but also politically.
And sometimes they have very important passengers. The source of the following quote is a BBC article [bbc.com] that is skeptical of the myriad conspiracy theories surrounding this plane crash:
On MH370 were 20 employees of US technology company Freescale Semiconductor. It makes powerful microchips for different sectors, including the defence industry. Twelve employees were from Malaysia and eight from China. It led to speculation that they held important industrial secrets. In one conspiracy theory, the US government feared they would fall into the hands of the Chinese authorities. As a result, the plane was hijacked and taken to the US base on Diego Garcia.
In another variation of the theory, it was the Chinese who took control of the flight to interrogate the Freescale staff to find out the scope of US surveillance. There was yet another theory - that Iran put passengers on stolen passports onboard in order to get control of Freescale's technical knowhow.
Freescale says the employees onboard were technical staff travelling to the company's chip facilities for a review.
I model the US government as being willing to kill a plane full of passengers to stop perceived brain drain, especially if there was something particular Freescale Semiconductor was working on that they didn't want the China government to have technical details about yet. But hey, I'm crazy, and means and motive aren't enough to determine guilt anyway.
(Score: 1) by Derf the on Friday December 30 2016, @02:18AM
My favourite theory is the Russians;
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/03/my-crazy-theory-about-mh370-went-viral-worldwide.html [nymag.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 29 2016, @09:07PM
How much is that data worth after all this time?
Remember the key reason for accident investigations is to make sure the causes of the accident are understood and to reduce or eliminate this sort of accident in the future. It might potentially save the lives of hundreds of people a decade, for example. It's not worth unlimited expenditures, but that can justify a fair bit of spending and effort.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NCommander on Friday December 30 2016, @01:06AM
The problem with leaving it unresolved is it causes a loss of confidence overall. It doesn't matter that their is less than a handful of plane crashes each year, the public remembers MH370, and also remembers it completely vanished. If there was a fundamental fault in the aircraft, it also means other flights are at risk; a lot of people would consider it gross negligence not to find and locate a crash site and determine why something happened.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday December 30 2016, @03:14AM
Look on the bright side, by now we have unprecedented ocean floor topology maps for an area that otherwise likely wouldn't have been mapped for a very long time.