Haylena Krishnamoorthy AND Subel Bhandari -
The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in 2014 has become one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries. Governments have forked out hundreds of millions of dollars, while experts have spent tens of thousands of hours scouring the Indian Ocean’s seabed.
Scientists have pored over satellite data and drift analysis, while authors have penned dozens of books — some more informed than others — speculating on what happened. But the Boeing 777 flight, along with its 239 passengers and crew, is nowhere to be found.
Investigators have had little to go on except for the scattered traces that the plane left on satellite and radar, and about 26 pieces of wreckage — only some of are almost definitely from MH370.
“He went to work, he didn’t come back. I want to know why. He was not sick, he was not on medical leave,” said Jacquita Gonzales, the wife of the in-flight supervisor on MH370.
“I don’t want it to be another Amelia Earhart... That was many years ago, there was no radar (back then),” she said on Monday, invoking the story of an American aviation pioneer who vanished without a trace while circumnavigating the globe in 1937.
The Malaysia Airlines overnight flight left Kuala Lumpur on March 8, 2014, but it never arrived at its destination in Beijing.
The surface search in the southern Indian Ocean between March 17 and April 28, 2014, covered more than 4.6 million square kilometres and involved 19 vessels and 345 sorties by military aircraft involving half a dozen countries.
It was followed by a two-year underwater search led by Australia. Investigators combed 710,000 sq km with hydrographic mapping of the seafloor, followed by a high-resolution sonar search of more than 120,000 sq km, covering 95 per cent of the assumed flight path in the area. It was the most extensive and expensive search in aviation history, but was suspended in January 2017.
“It is almost inconceivable and certainly unacceptable in the modern aviation era with 10 million passengers boarding commercial aircraft every day, for a large commercial aircraft to be missing and for the world not to know with certainty what became of the aircraft and those on board,” said a 440-page final report on the search, released in October.
Earlier this year, the private US-based Ocean Infinity was given approval to search for the plane by Malaysia’s government, who on the basis that the company would receive payment of up to $70 million if the jet was found. Its search area includes previously unsearched 25,000 sq km, flagged by Australia’s top science agency as a “priority area.”
Although the results of Ocean Infinity’s search are not yet known, a final deadline — previously extended twice — was set by Kuala Lumpur for May 29.
“The minister does not want to extend it any more. It’s counterproductive and counterintuitive,” Grace Nathan, a Malaysian lawyer whose mother was a passenger on board MH370, said on Monday.
“Why do you need to close the door to people who want to search?”
Gonzales said she was “baffled” by how long it has been without any clue, criticising government’s decision not to continue looking.
“The main thing is to find out what happened. Of course, we would love to send them away peacefully if we can,” Gonzales said.
“The whole world wants to know, it’s not just Malaysians involved.”
Malaysia is also preparing a report on the investigation into the disappearance but it is unclear when the report will be made public.
The mystery has over the years given rise to plenty of conspiracy theories.
They range from the remote cyber hacking of the flight to the plane being shot down by the military, as well as alien abduction and terrorist hijacking of the aircraft to Afghanistan’s Kandahar.
Some more credible experts have suggested that the suicidal pilot conducted a “controlled ditching” of the plane into the sea, but others have dismissed it. — dpa
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
