Last week Malaysia’s Transport Minister confirmed a private British firm was again searching for MH370, with the new search area covering 1500 kilometres of ocean, west of Perth, Australia
The new search for missing Flight MH370 has launched 11 years after the aircraft vanished – but experts have warned the slightest mistake will be ‘catastrophic’.
MH370 departed from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board. The flight took off at 12.41am local time, reaching a cruising altitude of 35,000 ft at 1.01am. The plane’s transponder, which communicated with air traffic control, was switched off at 1.21am as the plane entered Vietnamese airspace over the South China Sea.
Malaysian military and civilian radars began tracking the flight at 1.30am as it turned around and flew southwest over the Malay Peninsular and then northwest over the Strait of Malacca. Less than an hour later, at 2.22am, Malaysian military lost contact with the plane over the Andaman Sea. A satellite over the Indian Ocean continued to receive hourly signals from the aircraft until 8.11am, when it simply vanished.
An initial search spanned three million square kilometres above the water and more than 120,000 square kilometres under the sea, And last Tuesday, Malaysia’s Transport Minister confirmed on Tuesday that a private British firm was again searching for MH370, with the new search area about 1500 kilometres west of Perth.
This time, the search will use more advanced technology to map a comprehensive picture of the ocean floor. But experts are warning that one false move could scupper all efforts in what is likely to be the final search for the doomed aircraft, due to the ocean’s vast, isolated and treacherous area.
Craig Wallace, an electrical engineer from Deep Sea Vision who worked on the new technology utilised in the search, warned: “Make no mistakes, the Indian Ocean that they’re working in is among the worst in the world. They’ve recorded wave heights of 20 meters, so 60 feet. It’s extreme conditions and there will be a lot of times where they simply cannot launch or recover the vehicle.”
And issuing another warning, former Australian naval officer Peter Waring – who took part in the initial search for MH370 – told Australian programme 60 Minutes on Sunday night: “There’s absolutely no shelter out there, and there’s nowhere to hide. You’re six or seven days away from the nearest port, which is Perth. These are dangerous conditions. If something goes wrong, it will turn catastrophic very, very quickly.”
British marine robotics company Ocean Infinity has begun a search of the seabed in a last ditch attempt to find the wreckage. Armada 7806, a deep-water support vessel, arrived at a new search zone in the Indian Ocean 1,200 miles off the coast of Perth, Australia, over the weekend, according to tracking websites. Autonomous underwater vehicles were deployed from the ship just hours after its arrival at the site and are believed to have now started scanning the ocean floor.
The vessels, along with remote vehicles designed to help recover any wreckage found, are operated from Ocean Infinity’s Southampton base via satellite link. It’s thought that this latest search mission may provide the last chance of finding the wreck of the Boeing 777.
Over the past decade, there has been endless speculation about what happened to the doomed flight. Pieces of the plane have been located near Tanzania and Mozambique. Australian authorities searched for almost three years for the missing airliner.