On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared from radar after taking off from Kuala Lumpur on the way to Beijing. The Boeing 777 and its passengers have been missing ever since, and in the ten years since the disappearance, not more than a few aircraft fragments have turned up. Now a team of researchers has come up with a new way to calculate where the plane might be, and it involves yaw aircraft parts in the Indian Ocean in the name of science.
A program called the Finding MH370 Project has been launched to do exactly what the name suggests: find the remains of the Boeing 777 airliner that disappeared in March 2014. To do this, the project will not focus on sonar-equipped drones or thorough investigations of the seabed. Instead, the team plans to release Boeing 777 parts into the Indian Ocean and track their movements.
The project was launched by science journalist and private pilot Jeff Wise, who has written books about the disappearance of MH370, hosts podcasts and has been interviewed in several documentaries about the missing plane. Now he plans to provide insight into this the drift patterns of the MH370 parts that have already washed ashore.
Fragments of the plane washed up on a beach in Saint Denis, Reunion Island, in July 2015. reports LadBible. In the years since, scientists have tried to calculate the drift of these parts to try to figure out where they came from in the Indian Ocean.
Teams even went so far as to previously drop wing parts into the sea to see how far they floated. However, Wise and his team say these experiments did not go far enough. Now he hopes to drop a Boeing 777 flaperon strapped with sensors into the Indian Ocean. Over the course of 18 months, his team will analyze the movement of the piece and monitor the growth of ocean organisms on it to see how this compares to the growth of the piece. parts of MH370 that washed up. As the project explained in a blog post:
Marine organisms that live on some of these objects, such as barnacles, can tell us where they drifted from in the ocean. But when they examined these organisms, scientists were surprised by two paradoxes. First, the barnacles were far too young, indicating that there was a year’s gap between the time the plane disappeared and the time the pieces ended up in the water. Second, they lived over the entire surface of the flaperon, even above the waterline, something barnacles never do.
The Finding MH370 project will solve these paradoxes by obtaining a real 777 flaperon, equipping it with sensors and telemetry, and deploying it in the southern Indian Ocean for a 15-month mission. At the end of the experiment we will have a much clearer understanding of how the barnacles grew on the real flaperon and therefore how and where the object entered the water.
The final product of the project will be a report detailing our findings and revealing the implications for what happened to the missing aircraft.
There is no timetable yet for when the project could start, as that is still the case looking for financing to get off the ground. However, if it goes ahead, it will join a number of other missions to uncover the secrets of MH370 launched in recent months.
Ten years after the plane’s disappearance, Malaysian officials announced they would do “anything” to find answers about his whereabouts. This also includes working with an implementing company Sonar-equipped drones to the depths of the ocean to map the seabed.