Will MH370 ever be found? Experts reveal what will happen next in search for missing plane

The jetliner’s disappearance is widely considered one of the biggest aviation mysteries in modern times (Picture: Metro.co.uk/Datawrapper)

On March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200 flight operated by Malaysian Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur heading to Beijing.

For the 239 people on board, from passengers to flight staff, it was a routine flight. They had places to be, people to see.

They were AIDS researchers, semiconductor manufacturers, artists, nuns and students on their way to work meetings, retirement parties, honeymoons, holidays and to start new jobs and move into new homes.

None of them made it to Beijing. Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 abruptly swerved off its planned route, travelling thousands of miles off course over the southern Indian Ocean for roughly five hours before disappearing.

Technical signals sent by the plane in the roughly five hours it was in the air suggest it might have wound up in a 46,000-square-mile patch of the 27,300,000-square-mile Indian Ocean.

Parts of what are believed to be of the plan AFP Copyright: AFP or licensors

What happened to MH370 is widely considered one of the biggest modern civil aviation mysteries.

Yet the governments of Australia, Malaysia and China suspended their joint search in 2017 until ‘credible new information’ emerged about the plane’s whereabouts.

In conversations with Metro.co.uk, experts said that the future of the hunt means different things to different people.

Launching a new investigation shouldn’t just be seen as a way to solve a decade-long mystery, but as a way to provide closure for the families of the missing.

‘The search has no future until Malaysia steps up’

David Mearns knows how to find a wreck. He’s an oceanographer and the director at Blue Water Recoveries, a British salvage company which has an overall success rate of 90%.

Flight 370 is no different. Though he understands why working out precisely where the plane crashed is tricky.

‘The uncertainty is much greater about where it sank,’ Mearns says. ‘It’s in a very remote location, far from the coast. The weather is rough.

‘That doesn’t make it impossible, it just makes it hard and expensive.’

But Mearns has long refused to speculate about what happened to the aircraft. He prefers to stick to the facts.

‘Speculating allows people to say, “well, there’s no point in searching because we already know the answer”,’ he says. ‘”It’s the pilot”, “it’s this”, “it’s that”.

Several pieces of what investigators believe are parts of the plane (Picture: Metro.co.uk)

They’ve been found scattered across the Indian Ocean, among the largest oceans in the world (Picture: Metro.co.uk/Datawrapper)

Pieces of the lost craft have popped up over the years, such as in the French island of Réunion
(Picture: EPA)

‘Debris has floated away and been recovered – these were the first physical clues we had that, without question, we can say that it sank in the southern Indian Ocean.

‘But they’ve given us only a limited picture. They confirmed the plane crashed – but not precisely where. The whole story is at the bottom of the ocean somewhere.’

Why and how the plane vanished is a question that may not be answered until the jetliner is found – and possibly not even then. The cockpit voice and flight data recorders are on Mearns’ list.

‘The search has no future until someone in the Malaysian government steps up and decides to resume it,’ Mearns adds.

‘They haven’t given us any reason to be optimistic. We have very little to go on and even when there’s a change of government, this status quo of inaction has maintained since the last search.’

Away from sluggish officials and internet sleuths, however, Mearns says the focus on the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of MH370 should be on the families of the missing.

None of the 239 people aboard Flight 370 have been seen since the plane disappeared from radar screens (Picture: AFP/Getty Images)

‘The worst thing that could happen to anybody is to lose a loved one in a tragic circumstance,’ he says. ‘We all hope to live our lives without going through that, but a lot of people do go through it.

‘But then imagine on top of that, you don’t know what happened. You don’t even know where they are. You don’t have a body to bury. You don’t know what caused it. You don’t know if somebody is brought to justice

‘You are left with this gaping hole that can never be filled.’

‘Focus has to be on Captain Zaharie‘

When Clive Kessler, an emeritus professor in sociology and anthology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney who has studied Malaysia since the 1960s, first heard about the jetliner’s disappearance, he thought it was a ‘simple, or not so simple, depressurization mishap’.

‘But that option has become nearly impossible to maintain.’

Kessler feels that as much as plans for searches off the coasts of both Western and Southern Australia have been suggested over the years, there’s ‘no great eagerness to follow them up’.

‘Especially not in Malaysia where the main legal responsibility now lies.’

The prospect of searching – again – an area of ocean roughly the same size as North Korea and as deep as three miles below the surface is a daunting one.

Zaharie Ahmad Shah, a veteran pilot, had been flying with Malaysia Airlines since the early 1980s

So Kessler suggests narrowing the search slightly: ‘The focus has to be on Captain Zaharie, on Malaysian Airlines, on the oversight by the Malaysian government and on the initial investigations.’

Some gumshoes believe Zahari, 53, and the first officer, Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, at the controls of the 12-year-old Boeing 777 played a part in its disappearance.

Malaysian ministers revealed in 2016 that Zaharie used his personal flight simulator to practice a path over the Indian Ocean roughly where the aircraft is believed to have crashed not long before the flight.

Neither man has been accused of wrongdoing by officials, while those who knew them say their playing a hand in the vanishing act is unthinkable.

‘What’s to say? It is a scandal against the human need and right to know that this is still a mystery,’ Kessler adds.

‘Perhaps it is the case that some people do not want or prefer that things which they may know and which others now suspect should be proven true.’

‘I think eventually it will be found’

‘Aviation is the safest form of transportation ever designed by humankind and has been for many years,’ says Captain John M Cox, a former airline pilot and the chief executive of Safety Operating Systems, an American aviation consultancy firm.

‘This was true long before MH370 and is true today.’

The same can be said for the Boeing 777, according to the Aviation Safety Network. Cox stresses that MH370 spurred industry leaders to up their tracking game in remote regions, such as installing the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADSB) ‘where the aircraft transmits data to a satellite and radar is not required to determine the location of the aircraft’.

Aviation is far safer than some may suspect, aviation experts stress (Picture: Reuters)

Indeed, times have changed since the aircraft vanished 10 years ago. Initial searchers used whatever evidence they had to hand, so ‘the early days were not focused on the location of the impact on the ocean’.

Cox admits, however, that he hasn’t seen too many advancements in technology or theories that are massively useful – albeit, those reviewed by experts – for searchers today.

‘I think eventually it will be found,’ Cox continues. ‘We explore more and more of our planet. Just recently, there are reports and some evidence of Amelia Earhart’s aeroplane being found after many years. If proven, it is an example of continued interest and results in finding an answer. 

‘I think the best experts have provided opinions of the general area for a search. While several searches have not been successful, it does not mean they were not in the right area.

‘The depth and topography of the ocean floor make searching very challenging.’

‘I suspect that the pilot was responsible’

Millard Coffin, a marine geophysicist from the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania in Australia, has worked with other scientists to dive deep into the unknown depths of the Indian Ocean.

Literally.

Using sonar information and data obtained by autonomous underwater drones, his team have been able to create three-dimensional maps of the seafloor.

Ocean experts have been able to use the data from the MH370 search to recreate the Indian Ocean seafloor (Picture: Kim Picard and Jonah Sullivan)

‘Mapping the seafloor is absolutely essential for locating aircraft, ships, and anything else lost at sea and believed to be on the seafloor,’ Coffin says.

‘Although to date no aircraft debris has been identified in the search area, four shipwrecks and multiple shipping containers were found.

‘Elsewhere, seafloor mapping located missing Air France flight 447 offshore Brazil in 2011 after it was lost in 2009, and the missing Argentine submarine ARA San Juan offshore Argentina in 2018 after it was lost in 2017.’

Before the jetliner vanished, satellite-derived seafloor maps were only about five square kilometres. After the search, they were 40.

‘Bearing in mind that the search data were acquired without any scientific purpose, all knowledge gained has been truly serendipitous, albeit in the context of a profound human tragedy,’ Coffin adds.

Any new searches must look to these maps – and help keep making them.

‘With the caveat that it’s only my opinion, on the basis of the evidence that has come to my attention, I suspect that the pilot was responsible for the plane’s disappearance,’ Coffin adds.

‘South Indian Ocean is just 0.0336% of sea floor’

Walter Smith, a geophysicist with the American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says many people unknowingly fly over unmapped oceans every day, much like those aboard Flight 370 did.

‘Roughly 90% of the ocean floor remains unmapped,’ he says, ‘and 60% of the seafloor under commercial over-ocean air flight routes is unmapped.’

The world, Smith adds, barely knows anything more about the ocean depths today than it did in 2014.

But as Smith has sought to stress in his previous research, mapping the Indian Ocean is just the start when it comes to finding both past and future lost aircraft.

‘The data collected during the MH370 search has improved the knowledge of the sea bed in a small part of the southeast Indian Ocean,’ he says, ‘an area which is only 0.0336% of Earth’s ocean floor area.’

Relatives of the passengers and flight crew must not be forgotten amid the conspiratorial thinking, one expert says (Picture: Reuters)

Most experts agree that government officials need to back a new search, one that Oliver Plunkett, CEO of the American marine robotics company Ocean Infinity, says could soon be a reality.

His team handed the Malaysian government their latest proposal earlier this week after two previous failed attempts.

‘At this stage, we are unable to say definitively when a new search will take place as discussions are ongoing and there is still much work to be done,’ Plunkett told Metro.co.uk.

‘We are hopeful that our experienced team and marine robotics will be instructed in 2024.’

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