Expert: Crash site may be west of peninsula M'sia
Published on: Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Kuala Lumpur: Former pilot Desmond Ross has told Australia's Fairfax Media that the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean may have been in the wrong place, according to an inquisitor website report. "The search area in the southern Indian Ocean is based on flimsy science.""The search is based solely on 'pings' from the plane received by a satellite received by Inmarsat, a private British firm."
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MH370 went down where two separate computer analysis placed the wreckage, he claimed. "This is based on the location of the confirmed debris."Ross was referring to a computer model by German scientists at the GEOMAR-Helmholtz Institute for Ocean Research, and another study by statistician Brock McEwen, as Malaysia, China and Australia were scheduled to meet on Monday to consider calling off the search for MH370.McEwen, in a conclusion reached in April this year, agreed that the discovery of the debris fitted the theory that the crash site was in the seventh arc. However, he cautioned that if the crash site was indeed in the current search zone, more debris would have been discovered off western Australia and not in the western Indian Ocean. No such debris has been discovered, he pointed out.A piece of debris found on Kangaroo Island, off the southern coast of Australia, has not been confirmed to be from MH370.
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Likewise, the German scientists placed the crash site in the northern Indian Ocean, west of Malaysia and Indonesia, after studying oceanic drift patterns. Ross said that based on his experience the pilots of MH370 may have somehow been incapacitated and hence there's no way that the plane could have flown so far from its routine flight path to end up in the seventh arc in the current search zone. The zone covers 120,000 sq kms, 1,200 miles off southeast Australia.Except for a 15,000 sq km patch, the rest of the search zone has been scoured at some USD100 million for the Boeing 777-200 aircraft. It has so far been an exercise in futility.
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Ross believes that the ill-fated plane could only have been flying at a much lower altitude, after the pilots became incapacitated following probably some on-board crisis, and may have as a result crashed to the west of Malaysia in the northern Indian Ocean.He noted that the Australian Government had announced that the discovery of five pieces of MH370-related debris, found in the western Indian Ocean, fitted with the pattern that they could have come from the seventh arc. "Isn't it also true that these same parts may have come from somewhere much closer?" asked Ross. "How about a crash site to the west of Malaysia?"MH370, with 239 passengers and crew on board, disappeared on 8 March 2014 on a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. It's believed to have turned back just short of Vietnam, flown over the peninsula and Pulau Perak in the Straits of Malacca before reportedly looping around the northern tip of Sumatra.Thereafter, the location of the aircraft remains a mystery.Eyewitnesses in the Maldives, south of Sri Lanka, claimed to have seen a large plane in the colours of Malaysia Airlines on the day that MH370 went missing, according to previous reports. It was apparently in flames and was headed west.Stay up-to-date by following Daily Express’s Telegram channel.
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