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Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Third Study Now Shows Plane Lies North Of Official Search Area

Published on: July 28, 2016 at 12:49 AM
By Jonathan Vankin

The Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 aircraft, which vanished from the skies almost 29 months ago, probably lies in the waters of the Indian Ocean, in an area hundreds of miles north of the search area where the official search team has been scouring the ocean floor with no results since September of 2014, according to a new computer analysis by a research team in Italy.

The new study is the third such analysis using computer data on ocean drift patterns, tracing how debris follows the currents in the Indian Ocean, to show that the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 with serial number 9M-MRO (pictured at the top of this page, on an earlier flight) most likely did not enter the water inside of the area now being searched.

Earlier studies by statistician Brock McEwen and another by the German research group the GEOMAR-Helmholtz Institute for Ocean Research, both of which also closely studied how debris travels from east to west in the Indian Ocean, both reached the conclusion that the most probable crash site for Flight MH370 sits close to Indonesia, near the equator, rather than in the southern area of that ocean, about 1,200 miles off the coast of Perth, Australia.

The new study appears in the midst of a new controversy over reports of evidence pointing the possibility that the plane’s pilot deliberately flew the 777-200 seven hours and thousands of miles off course, and then glided it into the sea, killing himself and all 238 other passengers and crew on board.

The following video report from CCTV News explains the latest developments in the “pilot suicide” theory of the Flight MH370 disappearance.

Several debris fragments confirmed to have been pieces of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane have been discovered by various tourists washed up on beaches on the coast of southeast Africa, or on island beaches in the same region.

The new study by the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change in Italy, and led by researcher Eric Jansen, was based on two years of high-resolution data on ocean currents and wind conditions in the Indian Ocean, which were then matched against the actual locations where debris fragments have turned up.

According to the study, as reported by the BBC , “the conclusion is that main wreckage of the plane is likely to be in the wide search area between 28 degrees South and 35 degrees South that was designated by crash investigators.”

“However, only the southern end of this zone — a priority segment between 32 degrees South and 35 degrees South — is currently being surveyed by underwater cameras and detectors,” the BBC reported.

But the three-nation search team, led by Australia with Malaysia and China, has said that rather than continue searching in another area, they will suspend the search once they have covered the approximately 46,000 square miles — an area a little less than the size of New York state — where they decided two years ago that they would find the wreckage of Flight MH370, based on satellite data collected on March 8, 2014, the night the plane went missing.

Also this week, Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Center denied that any evidence pointed to Flight MH370 pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah as the cause of the plane’s disappearance, by an elaborate murder-suicide plot.

A report surfaced in New York Magazine earlier in the week revealing that when the United States FBI examined data from a home flight simulator used by Shah, they found that the pilot had indeed practiced flying a bizarre route into the Indian Ocean very similar to the route believed flown by the rogue Malaysia Airlines airliner on the night it vanished.

“There is no evidence to support this claim,” the Australian agency said in a written response. “The simulator information shows only the possibility of planning. It does not reveal what happened on the night of its disappearance nor where the aircraft is located.”

PREVIOUS MALAYSIA AIRLINES FLIGHT MH370 COVERAGE FROM THE INQUISITR

But the author of the New York Magazine article, Jeff Wise , noted that while denying that Shah was behind the disappearance and presumed destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, the Joint Agency Coordination Center statement acknowledged that the FBI did, in fact, find data from Shah’s flight simulator — data which showed “the possibility of planning” of the final route taken by the doomed plane.

[Photo By Aero Icarus / Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License]

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