MH370: Investigators say they've found missing Malaysian aircraft's crash site, call for search to resume
Investigators have reportedly identified a possible crash site for the doomed MH370 aircraft that mysteriously went missing in 2014. Aviation experts believe that they have found a probable site of the Malaysian Airlines passenger plane's crash that warrants a new search of the ocean floor in the region. The MH370 flight disappeared on March 8, 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur International Airport, Malaysia, to Beijing. The plane had 227 passengers on board from 15 nations along with 12 Malaysian crew members. Debris of the plane has reportedly been found on various islands, particularly in Africa. However, the reason for the crash has not yet been ascertained.
Experts believed that the aircraft flew 2,700 miles past Indonesia before crashing into the South Indian Ocean near the coordinates S34.2342 and E93.7875. The latest update in the case could be a possible new development in the investigation attempting to find the plane. Dr Victor Iannello, Bobby Ulich, Richard Godfrey, and Andrew Banks, in their study, examined 2,300 possible paths the plane could have taken to determine the most likely site of crash. It is now believed that the plane has "better than even odds" to be within 100 nautical miles from the new location. In the months and years after the aircraft disappeared, pieces of MH370 have washed up on coastlines in the western Indian Ocean. After years of continual searching for the missing plane, its official underwater search was stopped in the spring of 2018.
One of the four aviation experts who worked on the crash site study, Iannello, said: "I won’t speak for the other three authors, but I believe there are better than even odds that the plane is within 100 nautical miles of our last estimated point. Any other area has a much lower probability. Portions of the recommended search area were already searched by GO Phoenix and Ocean Infinity. Other than the portions that were previously searched, some of the data is either missing or of low quality due to the challenging terrain of the sea floor. "We believe another search should occur in the recommended search area. Prior to searching, the existing sonar data in that vicinity should be re-examined to ensure that the debris field was not misclassified as a natural feature."
The experts' report concludes that the most probable flight path of the Malaysian Airlines plane to be around 100 nautical miles to the west of Banda Aceh, on the island of Sumatra, in Indonesia. In September this year, plane debris was found on a beach in Australia, near Cape Tribulation in Far North Queensland, sparking new hopes of solving the mystery of MH370's disappearance.
In another theory on the plane, an author claimed that the MH370 may have landed for a short while before taking off again after it mysteriously disappeared, an expert claims. The aircraft reportedly went "dark" for one hour and thirteen minutes and it is not yet known what happened to the plane during that time. According to Jeff Wise, the author of 'The Plane That Wasn’t There', the aircraft could have made a single turn, gone around in circles or even landed and taken off again.
"The big unknown was what happened between 6.28 pm when the satcom was turned on and 7.41 pm. Had the plane made a single turn or flown around in circles, or perhaps even landed somewhere and then taken off again?” Wise said.