Goodnight Malaysian 370: The truth behind the loss of flight 370 by Ewan Wilson & Geoff Taylor

Author:Ewan Wilson & Geoff Taylor [Wilson, Ewan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wilson Aviation Ltd
Published: 2014-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

No Black Box, No Luck

The traumatic announcement by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak marked a new chapter in the search for MH370.

Inmarsat’s analysis based on radar data and satellite communications placed MH370 on a huge arc in the southern part of the Indian Ocean. The initial search area decided by a joint investigation team was 600,000 sq km in an area about 2500km from Perth. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott branded the area “as close to nowhere as it is possible to be”. With a 30-day deadline for the black box’s battery looming over the search team creating even more pressure, the odds of searchers striking gold were astronomical. Everything was against them.

As the ATSB’s Definition of Underwater Searches report sets out, success for an over-water search normally is dependent on a number of factors. These include position information from ground-based radar systems, position information automatically transmitted from an aircraft, position reports from crew, re-tracing of the flight route and eye witness reports, often from other aircraft or ships.

In the case of MH370 there had been no radio notification or a problem from crew and no radio communications after 1.19am on March 8. The final secondary radar position was midway between Malaysia air space and Vietnamese air space at 1.21am. At 1.25am the aircraft deviated from its planned flight route and the final primary radar fix occurred at 2.22am near the Andaman Islands in the Malacca Strait. The satellite communications log indicated the aircraft had continued to fly for another six hours until at least 8.19am. There were no confirmed eye witness reports and no emergency locator transmissions received and lastly, the Australian-led search was beginning 10 days after the aircraft went missing.

The scale of the problem for searchers in finding MH370 only comes into context when compared with Air France 447 which crashed on June 1, 2009, killing all on board. The ACARS system on that aircraft was reporting more parameters (and it was switched on) than MH370 and programmed to automatically transmit its position every 10 minutes.

The last Air France flight position report occurred at 2.10am and 24 maintenance messages were received via the same satellite operated by Inmarsat over the next five minutes. The impact time was based on the fact that a message had been expected to be received within one minute and hadn’t, narrowing the time the flight ended to between 2.14.26am and 2.15.14am. This narrowed the search area hugely and the first wreckage was found on June 6. The actual aircraft wreckage was not located for nearly two years.

A huge search effort for MH370, coordinated by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, was mounted along the specified area in the southern arc from March 18 involving an international fleet of aircraft and ships generally moving from south-west along the arc to the north-east.

On April 2 there was some hope when UK defence vessel HMS Echo, using a hull-mounted acoustic system, detected a ping in an area further to the north-east than Australian vessel Ocean Shield’s area of highest probability.

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