Can Malaysian Airline MH370 be finally found?

Perth

One of the most disastrous aviation mystery was disappearance of Malaysian airline MH370 that had on board 239 passengers and crew. The fateful day in March 2014 that registered a sudden disappearance of aircraft from the radar.

As the mystery around aircraft’s disappearance continues to haunt the families of victims, a British aeronautical engineer Richard Godfrey thinks he has calculated the crash site of Boeing 777. 

After spending more than a year trying to unsolved the disaster, Richard Godfrey believes that the aircraft had crashed into Indian Ocean about 2,000 km west of Perth, Western Australia.

In an interview with BBC, Godfrey hoped “we’ll be able to give closure to the next of kin and answers to the flying public and the aviation industry on exactly what happened with MH370 and how we prevent that in the future.” 

In a “complicated exercise”, Godfrey combined different sets of data to align to this new location. The sets were earlier kept in different domains. “No one had the idea before to combine Inmarsat satellite data, with Boeing performance data, with Oceanographic floating debris drift data, with WSPR net data,” he said. The study has determined an exact point through data calculations – around 33 degrees south and 95 degrees east in the Indian Ocean. 

Godfrey’s new proposal brings down the search to radius of 40 nautical miles. “The wreckage could be behind a cliff or in a canyon on the ocean floor,” he said. “And you need maybe three or four passes before you start to pick things up.” He added, “The wreckage could lie as far as 4,000 metres deep.” 

After disappearance of the MH370, two rounds of extensive searches were carried out in the Indian Ocean. But the results were inconclusive even after spending hundreds of millions of dollars. 

As the family members of victims onboard the Malaysian airline await for some tangible evidence around the events on that day, the pain is excruciatingly numbing. “It’s really just been an ongoing nightmare. There is never an end. We just seem to be going in circles and hitting a brick wall after another,” said Grace Nathan, who lost her mother Anne in the crash.

“We’ve been hoping for the longest time for something new – a new breakthrough, something new that would warrant the search starting again and at least there being a more precise location for the search being conducted at and to increase the odds of finding the plane,” she told in an interview to BBC. 

Hoping for a closure, Ms. Nathan has welcomed the new findings and wants the aviation experts to test the theory. She said, “We welcome all new findings, especially if it’s based on tangible evidence. In this case it is based on tangible evidence. It’s things that can be calculated. It’s not based on just Google images or loose things that can’t be backed up.”