The hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 should turn several thousand kilometers from the southern Indian Ocean to the Bay of Bengal, say supporters of new evidence that could suggest that the doomed jet may have crashed around 190 km (120 miles) south of Bangladesh.
Australian company GeoResonance uses radiation scanning technology to locate significant concentrations of minerals and metals. By comparing images of the Bay of Bengal before and after the jet disappeared, the firm uncovered what it believes to be a sudden deposit of aluminum — the chief component of the Boeing 777 that vanished shortly after departing Kuala Lumpur on March 8 — along with titanium, jet-fuel residue and other key substances that may indicate the wreckage of a commercial airliner on the seabed.
Nothing has been confirmed, but the firm says that the technology has previously “been successfully applied to locate submersed structures, ships, munitions and aircraft.” It stresses that it “is not declaring this is MH 370” but that the findings should be investigated.
Malaysian acting Transportation Minister Hishammuddin Hussein says Malaysia is “working with its international partners to assess the credibility of this information.”
The Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC), which runs the search from Australia, has dismissed GeoResonance’s suggestion, with officials in Perth saying they are “satisfied” four signals detected in the Indian Ocean came from the black boxes of the missing aircraft.
Those signals were plotted along a corridor defined by analysis of maintenance data by British satellite firm Inmarsat. Hundreds of air and sea reconnaissance missions have been launched based on the analysis, making the search operation the most expensive in history. An underwater drone continues to operate along this route.
However, by Inmarsat’s own admission, the calculations that defined the southern search corridor had never been done before. The firm’s refusal to release raw data, despite repeated desperate pleas from distraught relatives, means the scientific community has been unable to critique or corroborate the findings.
Jules Jaffe, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in California, tells TIME that he would like to think the Indian Ocean pings came from MH370, but: “One would really want to see the data to be more confident of that. I really hope that they have the quantitative analysis to back up their claims.”
There are difficulties with GeoResonance’s theory. While multispectral analysis has been used to discover subterranean mining deposits, electromagnetic radiation is absorbed by seawater, and many simply do not accept that it is capable of detecting a plane lying under a kilometer of ocean. David Gallo of the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who co-led the search for Air France Flight 447, told CNN the data was “perplexing on a number of fronts.”
Nonetheless, GeoResonance says, “The company and its directors are surprised by the lack of response from the various authorities.”
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Australian exploration company claims it may have found MH370 wreckage
(29th April 2014) After the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 had gone missing for nearly two months, today an Australian exploration company claimed to have detected the plane's wreckage, reported Star Online.
The news portal reported Adelaide-based GeoResonance as saying it has detected possible wreckage in the Bay of Bengal, 5,000km away from the current search location in the southern Indian Ocean off Perth, Australia.
It had said that its own search for the missing Boeing 777-200ER started on March 10.
GeoResonance’s search covered 2,000,000 square kilometres of the possible crash zone, using images obtained from satellites and aircraft, with company scientists focusing their efforts north of MH370’s last known location, using over 20 technologies to analyse the data including a nuclear reactor, reported Star Online.
“The technology that we use was originally designed to find nuclear warheads, submarines. Our team in the Ukraine decided we should try and help,” said company spokesperson David Pope to the news portal.
Pope was reported as saying, GeoResonance had compared their findings with images taken on March 5, three days before MH370 was reported missing – and they did not find what they had detected at that location.
“The wreckage wasn’t there prior to the disappearance of MH370. We’re not trying to say that it definitely is MH370, however it is a lead we feel should be followed up,” he said to Star Online.
The news portal also reported another GeoResonance spokesperson, Pavel Kursa, as saying that several elements found in commercial airliners was detected at the Bay of Bengal spot.
“We identified chemical elements and materials that make up a Boeing 777… these are aluminium, titanium, copper, steel alloys and other materials,” said Kursa in a statement reported by Australian news channel 7News.
Earlier today, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said that it was highly unlikely any debris would be found on the ocean surface from a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner, and that a new phase would now begin during which a much larger area of the ocean floor would be searched.
Abbott had said the underwater hunt for flight MH370 would be intensified as it conducts as thorough a search as "humanly possible".
A submersible Bluefin-21 scouring a 400-square-kilometre zone centred around one of these transmissions has so far failed to yield any results despite searching almost the entire area.
Abbott said the Bluefin-21 would continue its hunt, while Australia in consultation with the Malaysian government was willing to engage one or more commercial companies to undertake the extra work.
"While the search will be moving to a new phase in coming weeks, it certainly is not ending," the prime minister said today.
The aircraft vanished, with 239 passengers and crew on board, on March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
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