Could MH370 mystery finally be solved by search team sitting 8,000 miles away?
The decade-old mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 could finally be solved by a group of people in Southampton.
On March 8, 2014, MH370 was heading from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, to Beijing, when it deviated from its scheduled path.
The plane, a Boeing 777 carrying 239 people from 15 countries, was never seen again as it drifted towards the Indian Ocean.
MH370 remains one of the greatest aviation mysteries of all time, with everything from a hijacking to time travel proposed all while the families of the missing fear the world will move on.
Now a Houston-based underwater robotics company, Ocean Infinity, is hoping to finally solve it.
Working with Malaysian officials, the company will soon launch an army of drones to scour 6,000 miles of ocean floor.
And all from the company’s base in Woolston, a suburb of the English port town Southampton.
Inside the south coast control room, workers will soon sit in pods on gaming-like chairs operating the bots that use sonar technology to see, The Times reported.
Simon Maskell, professor of autonomous systems at the University of Liverpool, met with Malaysian ministers in May in a bid to get the green light for Ocean Infinity’s third bid at finding the doomed aircraft.
Together with aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey, Maskell believes that searchers can use flimsy radio waves to track down MH370.
These invisible waves lacing the world are called WSPR radio signals, used to test the strength of radio frequencies with global transmitters.
Maskell’s thinking is that every time a plane crosses these waves, it disrupts them, leaving behind a frequency footprint.
By following these disturbances, Godfrey says MH370 could be within an 18-mile radius of 29.128°S.
He wrote on his blog, The Search for MH370, that the region was either not searched or only partly during previous missions.
The first attempt at finding MH370 lasted 52 days, taking place largely from the air and covered 1,700,000 square miles.
The second search, a joint effort by Australian, Malaysian and Chinese officials, combed 46,000 square miles of the Indian Ocean floor.
While the third, which involved Ocean Infinity, was called off in 2018 after no evidence of the craft was found.
‘Part of our motivation for renewing the search was to try to provide some answers to those affected,’ Oliver Plunkett, the marine surveyor’s chief executive, said at the time.
‘It is therefore with a heavy heart that we end our current search without having achieved that aim.’
While the plane has never been found, about 20 pieces of debris believed to be from the wreck have washed up along the coasts of Africa and on Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion and Rodrigues.
Blaine Gibson, an MH370 wreckage hunter, believes this search has the best chance yet of finding the final resting place of MH370.
‘We have both old and new credible evidence and analysis pointing to the location of the crash site, better search technology and the results of past searches,’ he told The Times.
‘We have a much better idea of where the plane is, and where it is not.’
MH370 was the 8th aircraft to vanish since 1948, according to an analysis by Bloomberg. That means no trace of the passengers or debris from these flights has ever been found.
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