MH370: A black box search looking for a starting line

The 31 March AMSA map of the current and previous search sweeps

With the sailing later today if not early tomorrow of the RAN support vessel Ocean Shield for the current MH370 search zone the best metaphor might be that of a race against time in which this runner can’t even see the starting line.

Ocean Shield is as capable as it is possible to be to find the missing airliner’s cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, thanks to the US underwater searching technology which is on board.

By now its towed triangular shaped hydrophone, and the large torpedo shaped robotic deep sea probe, are part of household knowledge as the world watches the agonisingly but necessarily slow and methodical preparations for finding the recorders and main wreckage of the Boeing 777-200ER which went to the bottom of the southern Indian Ocean somewhere west of Perth on 8 March.

Less easy to grasp is that the hydrophone, which listens for the battery powered pingers on the two flight recorders, and the robot, which then has to descend 2000-4000 metres or more to the sea floor to home in on the location, can’t start their work in a purposeful and methodical manner until the point at which the jet entered the water is first defined with reasonable precision.

It’s not a race for the Ocean Shield to find the pingers before their batteries run out, early next week, or perhaps a few weeks longer, more than it is a race for other ships in the general area to find and retrieve floating objects which may or may not come from MH370, which mysteriously went ‘dark’ 42 minutes after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on 8 March with 239 people on board.

It is finding objects from the jet which could then lead backwards through analysis of winds and currents to the crash point.

Yet it is inevitable that the searching aircraft, satellites, and surface vessels will find more flotsam from normal maritime activities than a crashed 777. Fishing cast offs like nets and buoys,  and objects lost off cargo ships get circulated world wide if they can float large distances before perishing.  What might have been lost decades ago in the North Atlantic might be going around in the Indian and Southern Oceans, and not necessarily for the first time in rarer cases.

It isn’t clear if Ocean Shield will sail later today or early tomorrow, but it will take around three days to reach the current search zone, making the reasonable assumption that by the time it arrives an exact starting point might be known.

When the Prime Minister led a media conference at RAAF base Pearce, he had been well briefed. This was, in the absence of exceedingly good fortune, going to be an exercise for the longer haul.  He avoided naming any cut off date for the search and retrieval exercise, which he couldn’t have named, without the consent of Malaysia, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Singapore, the US, and other parties which have sent personnel and planes and ships to Perth and Fremantle.

This is, as the PM and his deputy and transport minister Warren Truss, made clear, a very significant co-operative venture by many countries, with bringing closure and certainty to the families and friends of the missing an early objective which could be made possible by finding objects which could only have come from MH370.

Today’s search map (top of page)  now shifts the focus slightly further away from Perth than yesterday. There is a wild card that needs to be kept in mind if some of the debris which may be found from MH370 may be coming from a stream of lighter material being released from the wreckage, depending on its state, on the sea floor.  If anything is going to go right for the search in the immediate term, any concentration of debris which might point to a continued release of debris from the jet would radically improve the chances of prompt recovery of the data  recorders.

It’s a small possibility, but MH370 is a mystery which really needs an element of luck to be solved in weeks or months instead of years.

A Wiki Commons photo of the Ocean Shield

MH370: A black box search looking for a starting line