New insights into the search for missing flight MH370, and what happens the moment the jet is found, were explained at a briefing for members of the Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute in Perth recently. Paul Kennedy, MH370 Search Project Director, Fugro Survey, took the audience through the same induction video shown to recruits before […]

New insights into the search for missing flight MH370, and what happens the moment the jet is found, were explained at a briefing for members of the Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute in Perth recently.

Paul Kennedy, MH370 Search Project Director, Fugro Survey, took the audience through the same induction video shown to recruits before they joined the three vessels that are sonar scanning the priority zones in the southern Indian Ocean that are believed most likely to contain the sunk wreckage of the jet.

This YouTube of his presentation gives but a distant low resolution view of Mr Kennedy’s graphics, but it is what he says that is of interest.

At the outset he reminds the audience that the so called seventh arc along which the priority zones are located is different from the earlier arcs which represented places MH370 could have been when it send automated pings to an engine performance monitoring site at Rolls-Royce in Derby via an Inmarsat satellite and ground stations.

This last and unexpected transmission from the jet was initiated by the failure of its engine generated electrical supply and the automated deployment of a ram air turbine that popped out of the fuselage to generate emergency power as the jet fell toward the sea.

With the help of audience members Mr Kennedy unrolled a large scroll of the seabed in the seventh arc priority zone that stretched across the room and out one door which had mapped its features and their depths with sufficient accuracy to prevent deep sea ‘tow fish’ or sonar scanning platforms being towed into the side of underwater obstacles like volcanic craters while surveying the terrain from a height of around 100 metres.

On that map MH370 would only have been a small dot, and it is of course covered in dots, and often convoluted terrain, with deep fissures and troughs and sea mounts and cliffs.

Mr Kennedy said the Boeing 777 would only have subtended half a millimeter in size on the waist high scroll unfolded across the room.

He explained that the raw data was not just being recorded on the search vessels in real time, but being uploaded to ‘cloud’ computers via specially targeted reception beams directed to them from satellites to provide a high bandwidth tunnel.

That data was being simultaneously but separately reviewed “by multiple sets of eyes in Australia and the US”. (He made no reference to Malaysia in relation to the uploads.)

This was occurring in sea states in which peak waves had been recorded as 16.5 metres at their highest, but more commonly of around 11 metres , and often around 6-8 metres.

(There is a great deal of information in the presentation on the working environment, and the health and safety precautions taken on ‘swings’ that included around 13 days total sailing time from Fremantle to reach and return from the priority zones).

Mr Kennedy said there had been prolonged periods when the search vessels had to maintain a heading into winds of around 150 kmh, unable to turn to either side in the sea states that prevailed. He said the crews working shifts covering continuous operations were holding onto the sides of their bunks while trying to sleep, causing considerable fatigue toward the end of periods of duty.

He said the seabed search includes ‘nightmare’ zones when towering complex cliffs and pot holes within volcanic craters may hide the wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines 777-200ER .

The Norwegian Hugin autonomous underwater vehicle or AUV was being used to explore the otherwise impossible to scan wrinkles which could contain parts of MH370. This had included descending deep into features inside volcanic cones, and continued to look into a 200 kilometres long 70 degrees slope that was around 1000 metres in height above the adjacent sea floor.

This slope contained ledges and fissures that the regular tow fish could not look into.

By coincidence on the first anniversary of the disappearance of MH370, a towfish had come across an unnatural set of objects which looked as though they could have come from the missing flight.

However when it was studied in closer detail by the AUV it was found to be an unchartered, and so far, untraced shipwreck.

Mr Kennedy said that some maritime detective work had established that the anchor was probably made around 1820. The actual wooden ship had disappeared over time, and all that was left was the anchor, the ship’s bell, a spread of metal nails and fixtures, and a large sea chest.

What happens when MH370 is found?

Once it is clear that MH370 has been found the satellite data links to the vessel will be shut down and immediate steps made to notify the next of kin of the 239 people on board the jet.

Mr Kennedy’s brief comments about this made it clear that the search intends, commendably, to ensure that those who lost their loved ones on MH370 will be first to learn that the jet and thus their final resting places, have been found.

They will not learn of it through the media. (However it is highly probable that once next of kin have learned of a discovery, word will reach the media, possibly before but most likely only shortly before, an official media briefing is called. These are this reporter’s observations, not Mr Kennedy’s).

Other revelations in the briefing include a sea floor duration of up to 32 hours for the AUV and a very important checking process that validates the performance of the equipment being used in the priority search area. The AUV doesn’t upload in real time, but sends tracking information to the surface, and on recovery after a dive then downloads its data.

Boeing has set up a test and calibration field on the sea floor that each vessel passes through on its way out of and into Fremantle with each tour of duty.

This field includes objects that would correspond to parts of the sunk wreckage of MH370, such as the engines and other heavy components, and replicates their expected resolution to sonar scanning tow fish.

The scientist who made this YouTube record of the presentation said,

“This is incredibly important as when you do surveying you must have confidence that all the work you have done is verified.

“If upon returning to port and doing a closing check on the way back, the items in the test field were unable to be sighted in the detail they had expected this would not only detect a fault with the equipment, but almost certainly void ALL of the past several weeks of deep ocean scanning carried out.

“You wouldn’t know if your equipment stopped working at 100 percent two weeks or 2 hours ago!

“So doing a return scan over the items off the coast of WA would be a great relief to all of the crew on board that all their work is valid.”

MH370 vanished early on a flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing on 8 March 2014, when the jet was over the Gulf of Thailand and about to enter air space under Vietnamese control.

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