A look at the progressive searches for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which are the most challenging and expensive undertaken in aviation history.
FIRST SEARCH: On March 8, 2014, an air and sea search begins in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea on the assumption that the plane crashed on its way from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing. Malaysia reveals two weeks later that its military radar had tracked the plane flying far off course to the west.
SECOND SEARCH: Analysis of satellite signals emitted by the plane in its final hours suggests that it crashed west of Australia. A sonar search appears to detect the ‘ping’ of the jet’s black box near the end of its monthlong battery life. But after 850 square kilometers (330 square miles) of seabed is searched, authorities conclude that they must have been mistaken.
THIRD SEARCH: Further analysis of satellite data defined a more remote search zone 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) off Australia’s southwest coast in the Indian Ocean. The 60,000-square-kilometer (23,000-square-mile) search area was later doubled. In July, officials agreed the search would be suspended once crews finish scouring the area, unless new evidence emerges pinpointing a specific location of the aircraft.
POSSIBLE FOURTH SEARCH?: In December, international investigators released a report based on a fresh analysis of the data concluding that the plane is highly unlikely to be in the current search zone, and suggesting that the aircraft may instead have crashed in an area farther north. The investigators said a new search should be launched of the 25,000-square kilometer (9,700-square mile) area immediately to the north of the current search zone. But Australian officials said that was unlikely, as the report failed to identify a specific location of the plane.
CHALLENGES: The search zone is so remote that the sonar ships spend half their monthlong shifts transiting to and from their Australian port. The ocean ranges from 600 meters (2,000 feet) to 6.5 kilometers (4 miles) deep, with the average depth being 4 kilometers (2.5 miles). The seabed has jutting ridges and volcanoes and deep, sharp crevasses.
COST: Australia has agreed to pay US$60 million and China $20 million for the current search. Malaysia has paid $80 million and has agreed to pay the balance of the final search cost.
KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 4 — A local lawyer on the French island of Reunion found two mineral water bottles from Malaysia among debris from the Indian Ocean washed ashore amid an ongoing search for the clues to the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 that went missing over a year ago.
In an interview with Australian daily Herald Sun, Philippe Creissen said he found three mineral water bottles while walking along the Bois Rouge beach; two of them bore made in Malaysia labels while the third was from Taiwan.
“I walk along this beach all the time and 99 per cent of the debris that is here comes from Reunion,” Creissen was quoted as saying in the Melbourne-based publication.
The foreign-made mineral water bottles caught his eye, more so following the discovery of an airline wing part that has been confirmed to be from a Boeing 777, the same model plane as MH370.
The plane carrying 239 people on board from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing disappeared off the radar on March 8, 2013, believed somewhere over the Indian Ocean; over 130 of the passengers were China nationals.
Creissen said he handed the bottles to the police, and was later told they had been passed to a Malaysian investigation team on the island.
The islander had snapped pictures of the bottles which he posted on Twitter account on Sunday which showed two common Malaysian bottled water brands — “Cactus Mineral Water” and “Life Pure Distilled Drinking Water”.
Questions have been raised over whether those debris found came from MH370 that went missing March 8, last year following the discovery of a wing piece of a plane on the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean last week.
Despite MH370 being the only Boeing 777 to be lost in the Indian Ocean, authorities have not confirmed the debris’ link to the missing aircraft.
Malaysia has sent a team to the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion to determine whether debris which washed up there is from missing flight MH370.
The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board vanished without trace in March 2014.
Aviation experts have said the debris looks like a wing component from a 777, known as a flaperon.
Malaysia Airlines said it would be “premature” to speculate on its origin.
There were 227 passengers on the flight, including 153 Chinese and 38 Malaysians.
“Whatever wreckage found needs to be further verified before we can further confirm whether it belongs to MH370,” Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai told reporters in New York where he was attending a UN Security Council debate for a separate Malaysian jet shot down over Ukraine.
“So we have dispatched a team to investigate on this issues and we hope that we can identify it as soon as possible,” he said.
French air transport officials are also investigating the wreckage
The wife of the in-flight supervisor for the missing MH370 plane, Jacquita Gonzales, told the BBC that she is torn by the news.
“A part of me hopes that it is (MH370) so that I could have some closure and bury my husband properly but the other part of me says ‘no, no, no’ because there is still hope,” she told the BBC by phone.
The two-metre-long (6ft) piece of wreckage washed up on the island, about 600km (370 miles) east of Madagascar, late on Wednesday.
The search efforts for MH370, led by Australia, are focussed on a broad expanse of the southern Indian Ocean – some 6,000km to the east of Reunion, which is a French region.
There have been other plane crashes much closer to Reunion, but flight MH370 is the only Boeing 777 to have disappeared in the area.
Officials said in April that the search area would be doubled if nothing was found
An US official told the Associated Press news agency that, based on the photos, investigators had a “high degree of confidence” that the part was a flaperon unique to a Boeing 777 wing.
A flaperon is a part of the wing used to manage the lift and control the roll of an aircraft.
French authorities in Reunion are also investigating the debris and Australian investigators are reported to be in touch with manufacturers over the find.
In a statement, Australian Infrastructure Minister Warren Truss said that if the wreckage was identified as being from MH370, this “would be consistent with other analysis and modelling that the resting place of the aircraft is in the southern Indian Ocean”.
Any new evidence will be used to refine search efforts, the statement added.
Analysis: BBC’s transport correspondent Richard Westcott
Experts should be able to tell fairly quickly if this is a piece of MH370. Aircraft parts have individual serial numbers on them, and the airlines should have records of all those numbers.
So in theory, investigators could check them and give a positive or negative ID. If it is part of the aircraft, it’s washed up thousands of miles from where search teams continue to look for debris at the bottom of the sea.
And realistically, although it would confirm the aircraft crashed and broke up, a piece of wing is unlikely to reveal much more about what actually happened on board the plane.
But these are all big “ifs” right now. It could still be yet another false alarm.
The Australian-led search teams have been focusing on a 60,000 sq km (23,000 sq mile) area off the coast of Western Australia, where the plane is believed to have crashed.
Australian Transport Safety Bureau Chief Commissioner Martin Dolan, who heads the operation, told AP that even if the part was proven to be from MH370 it would not change the search area, as it was “entirely possible that something could have drifted from our current search area to that island”.
Confirmation the debris came from MH370 would also disprove theories that the airliner went missing somewhere in the northern hemisphere, Mr Dolan said.
Key moments in the search for MH370
8 March, 2014: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport on Saturday 8 March (16:41 GMT, 7 March), and was due to arrive in Beijing at 06:30 (22:30 GMT). Malaysia Airlines says the plane lost contact less than an hour after takeoff. No distress signal or message was sent.
20 March: Australian search teams say they are investigating two objects spotted on satellite images in the southern Indian Ocean and sent long-range surveillance planes to the area. The objects were later revealed not to be from MH370.
24 March: The Malaysian prime minister announces that following further analysis of satellite data it was beyond doubt that the plane had gone down in this part of the ocean.
28 March: The main search area was moved 1,100km (684 miles) to the north-east and closer to Australia, following further analysis of the speed of the plane and its maximum range.
5-8 April, Australian and Chinese vessels using underwater listening equipment detected ultrasonic signals, which officials believed could be from the plane’s “black box” flight recorders. The pings appeared to be the most promising lead so far, and were used to define the area of a sea-floor search.
29 May: Australian officials announced that the search had found nothing and the area where the signals were heard could be ruled out as the final resting place of the plane.
26 June: Officials announced a new 60,000 sq km search area some 1,800 km west of Perth. This phase of the operation started in August with detailed mapping of the sea bed.
16 April, 2015: Officials from Australia, Malaysia and China say the search area would be doubled if nothing is found in the current search zone.
Malaysia has declared Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 an “accident”, meaning all 239 on board the ill-fated aircraft are presumed dead, but insisted the search for the plane last seen on March 8 last year “remains a priority”.
Nearly 11 months and up to S$130 million were spent on an unsuccessful search for the plane which mysteriously disappeared without a trace enroute from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Malaysia’s civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman said that after 327 days “and based on all available data”, “survivability is highly unlikely” for those on the plane that is believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia.
The area is far from any landing site and has “adverse sea conditions with known depths of more than 6,000 metres,” he said.
“It is therefore with heaviest heart and deepest sorrow, that on behalf of the government of Malaysia, we officially declare MH370 an accident in accordance with standards… and that all 239 of the passengers and crew onboard MH370 are presumed to have lost their lives,” the Department of Civil Aviation director general said in a pre-recorded statement broadcast live on national television at 6pm.
Mr Azharuddin added that the search for the Boeing 777 remains a priority for the government but today’s announcement means the process of compensation “whether it is pursued through consultation or through litigation” can begin.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Thursday also called on “the Malaysian side” to fully investigate and settle claims with passengers over a missing Malaysia Airlines jet, Reuters reported. Mr Li made the remarks to reporters, according to a statement on the government’s website.
Australia is leading the efforts to locate debris of MH370 in some of the remotest and deepest parts of the Indian Ocean in the world’s longest search for a jet in modern aviation era.
The aircraft’s disappearance on March 8, 2014, on a routine flight to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur has puzzled authorities as no distress signal came from the Boeing 777-200 plane before it went off radar screens.
Malaysia’s government and the ailing national flag carrier – which also saw a flight on its way home from Amsterdam being shot down over Ukraine on July 17, 2014 – were widely criticised for a disorganised and secretive response to MH370’s disappearance, especially from Chinese citizens, whose countrymen made up the bulk of those onboard.
A press conference was scheduled earlier in the evening but relatives of those lost had turned up unannounced, forcing authorities to cancel the event as “it was not appropriate to continue”, the department said in a statement, adding that separate arrangements had been made to brief the next-of-kin.
PETALING JAYA (The Star/Asia News Network) – Insensitive, rude and heartless. These are just some of the remarks expressed by Malaysians shocked at seeing “bloodied MH370 costumes” of Halloween party-goers on the internet.
“Morons. Jerks. What the hell are they thinking?” said Aishah Khumaira who could not contain her disgust for their costume choices.
“I wish I could throw a grenade to them. I’m bursting out like crazy because of these idiots. Do they even know the word ‘respect’? Bloody non-educated people!”
Chris Sim condemned the revellers for demonstrating “zero respect” for passengers and crew of MH370, as their families are still yearning and longing for their return.
A search for #flightmh370 on Instagram and Twitter by The Star Online on Sunday, showed at least six individuals who made Halloween costumes related to the tragedy.
One of them, Instagram user nystone01, had uploaded a picture of three zombie-like individuals in cheongsams, while showing off their cabin crew identification cards, bearing the Malaysia Airlines logo.
The picture was accompanied with a hashtags such as ‘something wrong’, ‘Malaysianairlines’, and ‘flightmh370’.
Arif Sharimie said it reflected “a low class mentality”, and “the the two most common elements in the universe are “hydrogen and stupidity”.
Australian National University student Michael Loo said his institution’s newspaper also came up with the poor idea: “How bloody inconsiderate.”
Hilmiah Ahmad said their actions did not consider the feelings of families affected by the tragedy.
“Shame on them. Guess it never occur to them that similar tragedies could happen to members of their family too,” she added.
To Nicholas Lin, the insensitive actions stemmed from a lack of empathy with Malaysians and other nationalities affected by the mysterious disappearance of Flight MH370 on March 8.
“Because its nothing to do with their country. Try making fun of 9/11 and see how they react?” he added, suggesting that no national tragedy should be made light of.
