It has taken months of planning, will cost tens of millions of pounds to execute and involves searching an area geologists know far less about than the surface of Mars.
Six months after Malaysian Airlines flight 370 disappeared without a trace, creating one of aviation’s greatest mysteries, the world’s largest underwater search is poised to begin.
According to Martin Dolan, the Australian in charge of the search, fresh mapping of the seabed has identified what appear to be hard objects inconsistent with the surroundings.
They were located within the area due to be searched, as identified by MH370’s satellite-tracking data and flight-simulation analysis.
Mr Dolan said however that they could be rock formations protruding from the sand rather than wreckage. “There is nothing that has screamed out and said ‘I look like an aircraft’,” he added.
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The Boeing 777 jet that vanished on March 8, carrying 239 people on an overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, could potentially lie in an area of ocean floor the size of South Africa.
Experts from Australia, Britain and the US are confident, though, that they have narrowed the likely resting place to a smaller, 60,000 sq km (23,000 sq mile) arc in the Indian Ocean, 1,800km (1,110 miles) off the coast of northwestern Australia.
“It’s still a hell of an area,” said Mr Dolan, who heads the Australian Transportation Safety Bureau.
The hunt for MH370 has been overshadowed by the shooting down over Ukraine in July of a second Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777, with the loss of 298 lives, but its disappearance remains one of aviation’s greatest mysteries because nothing from the lost flight has been found.
An international team of investigators tracking its probable whereabouts have had to rely on a sparse trail of automated satellite transmissions that MH370 left as it mysteriously turned south before running out of fuel and crashing into the Indian Ocean after seven hours and 38 minutes of flight.
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The investigators are also relying on hours of flight simulator data to come up with the most likely scenario of how far MH370 travelled — and how it crashed — once its two engines shut down through lack of fuel.
They will have a likely answer within a week, according to Mr Dolan. This will help to determine the highest priority search areas
In June, Australian authorities issued a preliminary report in which they theorised that MH370’s crew become incapacitated — possibly due to oxygen starvation — and that the plane ended as a ghost flight on autopilot.
The Boeing disappeared into an area of the Indian Ocean so unexplored that maps of Mars and Venus are 250 times more accurate than those in existence for the sea floor in the region — made by boats that passed through in the Sixties and Seventies.
Over the past three months Australian authorities have chartered sophisticated Dutch and Chinese vessels that have beamed sonar to the ocean floor to make fresh maps of contours.
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They have discovered that the old maps are wildly inaccurate — up to at least 1,500m out on the depths of crevasses and the height of ridges. “The area is horribly, horribly complicated,” Mr Dolan said.
The greatest risk is that sonar equipment and cameras worth more than £100 million could be wrecked if they struck a geological formation.
No decision has yet been made by countries most involved in the search — Malaysia, China and Australia — on whether they should recover human remains if they were found. Experts said that while lack of oxygen would slow the decomposition of remains, the water pressure at such depths means that bodies are unlikely to be intact.