Australian authorities may extend the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 beyond the current area, despite previously asserting the operation would be put on hiatus.
The new head of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, Greg Hood, said this week that officials were planning the next phase of the deep-sea sonar search for MH370 in case the current area turns up nothing.
Experts are reportedly attempting to define a new search area, despite the absence of any funding commitment to enact it.
This runs counter to the announcement made by Malaysia, Australia and China in July, that the effort would be indefinitely suspended if the current search of a 120,000 sq km (46,000 sq miles) area of the southern Indian ocean, due to end in the coming months, did not reveal the whereabouts of the plane.
Cost was said not to be a factor in the decision to put the effort on hiatus, but the current endeavour in a stretch of ocean south-west of Australia has cost AU$160m (US$122m).
Associated Press reported on Friday that Hood – who took over from Martin Dolan as chief commissioner of the ATSB at the end of June – has said that a new search would require a new funding commitment.
“If it is not in the area which we defined, it’s going to be somewhere else in the near vicinity,” he said.
The ATSB was conducting further analysis of the flaperon that was found on Réunion Island off the coast of Madagascar in July last year, 15 months after the plane went missing, in the hope of narrowing a new possible search area.
The flaperon was the first piece of wreckage to be recovered from the lost Boeing 777, which disappeared with 239 people on board in March 2014.
Hood said that six replicas of the flaperon would be sent to Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s oceanography department in Tasmania, where scientists will try to determine what affects their drift.
Examining the effects of currents and wind on their movement would enable more accurate drift modelling.
If funding could be found, the next phase would see the ATSB set the replica flaperons with satellite beacons and set them adrift at different points in the southern Indian Ocean around 8 March next year: the third anniversary of the disaster.
Peter Foley, the ATSB’s director of Flight 370 search operations since the outset, told AP that he hoped the enhanced drift modelling would narrow the next search area to a band of 5 degrees of latitude, or 550km (340 miles).
“Even the best drift analysis is not going to narrow it down to x-marks-the-spot.”
Some critics argue that the international working group that defined the current search area were wrong to conclude that the most likely scenario was that no one was at the controls when the plane hit the ocean after flying more than five hours.
The current search area was defined by analysis of a final satellite signal from the plane that indicated it had run out of fuel. Scientists have determined how far the plane could have travelled from a height of up to 12,200m (40,000 feet) after both engines lost power.
But critics who favour the theory that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was always in control of the plane argue that he could have glided it beyond the current search area.
Some say he could have made a controlled ditch at sea in order to minimise debris and make the plane vanish as completely as possible. Officials say Zaharie flew a similar route on his home flight simulator only weeks before the disaster.
Foley told AP that analysis of a flap that washed up on Tanazia in June suggested it had not been deployed when it hit the water, but rather retracted inside the wing. A pilot attempting a soft landing would have extended the wing flaps.
The ATSB is awaiting the verdict of a Boeing accident investigation team on their findings.
Recent analysis of the final satellite signals also suggest the plane was descending at a rate of between 3,700 metres (12,000ft) and 6,100 metres (20,000ft) a minute before it crashed. A rate of 600 metres (2,000ft) a minute would be typical of a controlled descent.
“The rate of descent combined with the position of the flap if it’s found that it is not deployed will almost certainly rule out either a controlled ditch or glide,” Foley said.
“If it’s not in a deployed state, it validates, if you like, where we’ve been looking.”
Crews have not given up hope of finding the plane in the current search area. Less than 10,000 sq km (4,000 sq miles) of seabed remain to be scanned, though it may take until December to complete due to bad weather and 20m (65ft) swells.
More than 20 sonar contacts off the Australian port of Fremantle, where the search ships are based, require closer examination by a sonar-equipped underwater drone.
“We are still hopeful and optimistic,” Hood told AP.
Foley said finding the plane was the only chance of the solving the mystery of what happened aboard MH370.
“We will never know what happened to that aircraft until we find it.”
