More than 10 years on from the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappearance, the Malaysian government today announced a revolution in aviation’s most notorious riddle. Searches for the Boeing 777, missing on 8 March 2014 after carrying 239 people, are being rekindled using the most advanced technology. Ocean Infinity, a private maritime robotics company, has taken over the search for an 18-month term. If it locates the aircraft, the firm can get $70 million.
At the heart of this new quest is the use of the novel Weak Signal Propagation Reporter (WSPR) technique. The type of WSPR most frequently seen on the ham radio, using low-power radio signals to generate “breadcrumbs” tracking a plane. Examining disruptions in these signals on the day MH370 vanished, scientists are hoping to trace its final movements.
Simon Maskell, an autonomous systems expert who works for Ocean Infinity, underscored how WSPR can hone in on the search field. ‘If we can say that we’re certain that the plane couldn’t have flown some of those directions, we can narrow our scope of search,’ he said. Flight MH370 had taken off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing, then disappeared after dipping west into the Indian Ocean. The bulk of the plane’s wreckage has been recovered on the east coast of Africa, though no-one has identified its main mass.
Ocean Infinity has already defined a 5,800-square-mile region in the South Indian Ocean (around the size of Connecticut) as the main search area. Experts think the fuselage had buried itself into the seabed, making it harder to recover. Combining WSPR and marine robots, this work will be one major achievement on the path to the MH370 investigation. Families and aviation historians wait, glued to the TV screens, for answers and resolution in this grim story.
