From the first day MH370 went missing, it was the subject of an intense surface search. Planes, ships and satellites scoured millions of square kilometers of ocean. Not a single piece was ever spotted. In today’s episode we talk about how it went down, and what we might conclude from it. We also touch on a strange coda to the search, that involved an attempt to find the plane by listening for audible pings from the plane’s black boxes.
As we’ve previously discussed, at first everyone thought that the plane had crashed in the South China sea, under its original route to Beijing. At first this was a Search and Rescue mission, as authorities hoped that the plane might have ditched à la Miracle in the Hudson and some survivors could be rescued. But as time went by hope quickly faded.
At first, planes and ships searched the South China Sea and the Andaman Sea to the West. After the Inmarsat data was discovered, the search area shifted into the South China Sea. The hope was that once debris was spotted, its location would give them a rough idea where the plane had crashed. They would then be able to lower listening devices in order to detect automatic acoustic pings generated by the plane’s black boxes. Once the black boxes were found and retrieved, the data they contained would allow investigators to know exactly why the plane had crashed. The mystery would be solved.
This sequence of events has been followed numerous times, such as with the crash in 2009 of Air France 447, which we’ve discussed several times before.
Over the course of the next month, an armada of ships and planes searched over millions of square kilometers of ocean surface, but no debris from the plane was spotted. Frustrated, the investigators realized that the batteries on the acoustic pingers would soon run out. These pingers have an underwater detection range of one one or two miles, so without any surface debris to provide guidance the chance that you could lower a listening device into any random spot on the ocean and detect a signal are vanishingly small. Yet with time running out searchers figured they might as well give it a shot. At the beginning of April they started to listen. Lo and behold, they detected a signal!
The Australian government, which was now in charge of the search, was very confident that they had solved the mystery of MH370. The Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, declared: “we are very confident that the signals that we are detecting are from the black box on MH370.”
I (Jeff) was very skeptical. I went on CNN and pointed out that, among other things, the acoustic pings that were detected were of the wrong frequency. And I turned out to be right. The authorities sent down submersibles to scan the seabed where the pingers had been heard and found nothing at all.
By late May, officials started to admit that it had been a wild goose chase.
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