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Another aerospace blog entry? Yes please.
Last week there was speculation that a mysterious
airplane piece that washed up on a sandbar in the Mozambique Channel was
from the doomed flight MH370. This would be notable because--if confirmed--it
would be just the second recovered piece of wreckage from the plane that
virtually vanished in March 2014, now two years ago.
To
jog your memory: MH370 departed Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on March 8, 2014 for
what was supposed to be a six hour flight to Beijing. After 45 minutes of
flight time, all radio connection with the flight had ceased. Radar confirmed
the plane never flew over Vietnam on its way to China; instead Malaysia
military radar found the plane 200  miles northwest of Penang and nearly 400 miles
off course. It seems a pilot had reversed the course of the plane and flew in
the wrong direction for as long as six hours. This would be the last confirmed
location for MH370, and outside of a piece of flaperon debris that washed
ashore Reunion Island in July 2015, the plane has outright disappeared.
(Click map to enlarge)
Since March 31, 2014 a team of Australian, Chinese, and
Malaysian searchers has been scouring 120,000² km of seafloor, and have yet to
find anything. At first, the rugged underwater terrain required a bathymetric
survey to be completed. Now three vessels--each towing an underwater equipment
module with side-scan sonar, multi-beam echo sounders and video cameras--scour
the area daily with no results yet. A fourth vessel deploys an underwater autonomous vehicle. To date they've covered nearly 75% of the
search area, which to one search executive means that they'll inevitably
find the wreckage sometime this year. The cost of this search stands at
$148 million.
The confirmed MH370 component that washed ashore of France's
Reunion Island, 2,500 miles west of the designated search area, is consistent
with debris drift models. The part was a flaperon from a Boeing 777 that was
confirmed to be part of MH370 after the part serial number was found with a
borescope by French aviation officials.
Ocean drift
models predicted that about a year and half later debris would begin
washing ashore along the east African coast. However only the flaperon is
confirmed.
 The new piece of potential wreckage is a scrap of metal with
a fastener lodged in it that is part of a plane's horizontal stabilizer. It was
found at the end of February by an amateur American scavenger looking for MH370
clues. There has been initial insight
that the part definitely is Boeing and belongs to a 777 aircraft, but the
person who found it believes
the part could be too small to belong to a 777. Australia
will take over analysis of the piece, which should only take a few days.
It the piece does turn out to belong to MH370? It will
confirm that the plane broke apart, either on impact or in the air. There were
previous reports that MH370 likely landed intact, which would explain the lack
of flotsam.
No matter what, we're one day closer to resolving a dark day
in airline travel.
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Re: Two Years Later, but No Leads for Doomed Flight MH370
