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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday December 29 2016, @07:41PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Thursday December 29 2016, @10:40PM

    by JNCF (4317) on Thursday December 29 2016, @10:40PM (#447216) Journal

    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.

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  • (Score: 1) by Derf the on Friday December 30 2016, @02:18AM

    by Derf the (4919) on Friday December 30 2016, @02:18AM (#447247)