Tracking MH370: US researchers to sink another Boeing 777 to find first one

On March 8, 2014, radar contact was lost with a Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 shortly after it departed from Kuala Lumpur on its way to Beijing.

The Boeing 777 and its passengers have remained unaccounted for, and only a few aircraft fragments were discovered in the ten years following the vanishing.

Now, a group of researchers has developed a new method for determining the possible location of the aircraft, which includes dropping plane components into the Indian Ocean.

Finding MH370

A project named the Finding MH370 Initiative has been initiated with the specific goal of locating the wreckage of the Boeing 777 airplane that disappeared in March 2014.

In order to accomplish this, the project will not utilize sonar -equipped drones or extensive seafloor searches.

Instead, the team intends to release Boeing 777 parts into the Indian Ocean and monitor their movements.

Jeff Wise, a science journalist and private pilot, initiated the project.

He has authored literature on the vanishing of MH370, runs podcasts, and has appeared in multiple documentaries discussing the aircraft’s disappearance.

He intends to provide information about the drift patterns of the MH370 components that have already been found on the shore.

Searching Ocean

Fragments from the aircraft first appeared on a shoreline in Saint-Denis, Reunion Island, in July 2015.

Scientists have focused on the drift of these parts in recent years as they try to determine their origin in the Indian Ocean.

In the past, teams even dropped wing components into the sea to observe their flotation distance.

Wise and his team believed that these experiments needed to be more extensive.

He aims to release a flaperon from a Boeing 777 equipped with sensors into the Indian Ocean.

His team will spend 18 months analyzing the movement of the piece and monitoring the growth of ocean organisms on it in order to make comparisons with the parts from MH370 that washed ashore.

Dropping Boeing 777 parts

According to Wise, “Marine organisms living on some of these objects, such as barnacles, can tell us where in the ocean they drifted from. But when they examined these organisms, scientists were puzzled by two paradoxes.”

First, the barnacles were too young, suggesting a year-long gap between when the plane disappeared and when the pieces went into the water.

Second, they were living all over the entire surface of the flaperon, even above the waterline, something that barnacles never do.

The Finding MH370 project will resolve these paradoxes by getting a real 777 flaperon, outfitting it with sensors and telemetry, and deploying it into the southern Indian Ocean on a 15-month mission.

“At the end of the experiment, we’ll have a much clearer understanding of how the barnacles grew on the real flaperon and hence how and where the object entered the water,” he added.

“The project’s final product will be a report detailing our findings, and revealing the implications of what happened to the missing plane,” Wise concluded.