Almost three years after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished, new research commissioned by the Australian government’s search team has concluded that more than £50 million has been spent looking for it in the wrong place.
Fresh analysis into how the Indian Ocean’s winds and currents carried small pieces from the lost aircraft on to African coastlines points to MH370 having crashed into the sea north of where the huge search has been concentrated.
Three search vessels have almost finished scouring 120,000 sq km (46,000 sq miles) of seafloor where it was believed that the aircraft had crashed in March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew aboard.
The hunt — jointly funded by Australia, Malaysia and China — is due to end next month. Nothing has been found.
After the analysis had been released yesterday by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), the Australian government ruled out extending the search because the analysis failed to provide a specific location for MH370.
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The ATSB, which strongly believes that the search should be extended, privately hopes that the Malaysian government, as the owner of the lost aircraft, may fund a new search.
The Boeing 777 aircraft mysteriously reversed course while on an overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. It is believed to have flown south on autopilot for more than six hours, with its two pilots probably dead, before running out of fuel and crashing into the Indian Ocean about 2,600 km (1,600 miles) off the coast of Western Australia.
The report of a meeting of international aviation experts, assembled by the Australian government, all but concedes that MH370 will not be found in the present search area, saying that there is “a high degree of confidence” that it does not contain the aircraft.
Instead the experts — according to their findings, which were also released yesterday — agreed with studies that take ocean drift into account, which suggest that MH370 is within a 25,000 sq km area north of the present search zone.
It was revealed in the reports that oceanographers had constructed replicas of several confirmed parts of MH370 that had been washed up on and near the African coastline.
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They cast the replicas, including a large wing flap, into waters off Tasmania and discovered that they picked up more wind and drifted faster than had previously been thought.
The oceanographers then linked this information to when and where the original pieces of MH370 were discovered, and concluded that debris from the aircraft probably drifted west across the Indian Ocean from a crash site that was north of where the search has been conducted.
The absence of any debris washing up in Western Australia also supports the new theory.