‘Groundbreaking’ new evidence could finally solve the mystery of flight MH370, which went missing almost a decade ago.
Malaysia Airlines flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport on 8 March 2014, heading for the Chinese capital of Beijing.
Howver, the plane tragically went missing with all 239 people on board presumed dead, and while aircraft's crash site was never discovered, some debris have since been found.
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The plane's last communication came about 38 minutes after take-off, when the aircraft was travelling over the South China Sea.
Radar than tracked it going dramatically off course, with the plane abruptly turning west, though it had been flying north.
The last primary radar contact was an hour later.
The first piece of debris from flight MH370 was the plane's flaperon - part of the wing - which washed up on a beach on the island of Réunion off the east coast of Madagascar, some 16 months after the plane disappeared.
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With the exact details of what happened one of aviation’s biggest mysteries, investigators have continued trying to get to the bottom of things – including researchers Richard Godfrey, Dr Hannes Coetzee, and Professor Simon Maskell, who released a new case study yesterday (31 August).
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In the study, the team explore ‘groundbreaking amateur radio technology called Weak Signal Propagation Reporter (WSPR) to detect and track flight MH370’.
“This aircraft tracking technology has been developed over the last 3 years and the results represent credible new evidence in the search for MH370,” Godfrey explains on the project’s website, adding: “Around 10 million commercial passengers fly every day and the safety of the airline industry relies on finding the cause of this and every other aircraft accident.”
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When an aircraft travels through a WSPR link, it ends up disturbing the signal.
The 232-page study used 125 of these signal disturbances – records of which have been held in a global database – to track the path of the plan for more than six hours after one of the last radio contacts, combining this information with Boeing data, Inmarsat satellites and drift analysis to come to a 'significant multidisciplinary outcome' of the same crash site: about 1,560km west of Perth, Australia.
The team wrote: “Together with [the data], a comprehensive picture of the final hours of flight MH370 can be collated.
“Flight MH370 was diverted into the Indian Ocean where it crashed of fuel exhaustion [...] at some point after the last signal after midnight.
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“At the time of writing, MH370 still has not been found despite extensive surface and underwater searches.
“About 10 million commercial passengers fly every day and the safety of the airline industry relies on finding the cause of every accident.”
Godfrey explained how the case study presents 67 positions for the flight over the course of ‘the next 6 hours 27 minutes of flight, as detected by a total of 125 anomalous WSPR links.
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“The results of this case study align with the previous analyses by Boeing, Inmarsat and the drift analysis by the University of Western Australia of the MH370 floating debris that has been recovered from around the Indian Ocean,” he said.
“In a next step, Prof. Simon Maskell is also developing a variant of the algorithm first developed by DSTG Australia to determine the probable crash location of MH370, but this time modified to incorporate the WSPR data.”
Aviation expert Geoff Thomas told the Today show that relatives of the victims supported the report, despite pushback, and were looking to present it to the Malaysian government.
"There has been some criticism, but this report has been peer-reviewed," he said.
"A scientist from the University of Liverpool and the ocean company who did the search in 2018 will use it as a basis for a new search.
"There is a very high level of confidence. It has been four years in the making, being reviewed over and over again.
"They are certain that they have located where this aircraft is."
Topics: World News, Technology
Jess Hardiman