It is now likely that within the next three months the search for the black boxes from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 will be abandoned. Two years ago, when the Boeing 888-200ER disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, there was quiet confidence that the wreckage of the aircraft would be found somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
Once the flight recorders had been recovered, the mystery of why the airliner veered completely off course and headed across Malaysia then turned south over the Indian Ocean would be solved. This was of intense importance to the distraught relatives, most of them Chinese, of the passengers and crew. It was also of intense interest to the international aviation authorities who needed to understand what had gone wrong and put in place systems that would prevent whatever had happened from occurring again.
But unless some remarkable discovery is made, it now seems certain that by the end of the summer the intensive underwater search for the flight recorders will be abandoned. The beacons that could have helped them be located faded within hours of flight MH370’s disappearance. There are still three vessels searching a vast 120,000 square kilometers of ocean.
So far five bits of debris have been identified as almost certainly coming from the crashed airliner. They have been washed up thousands of miles from the search zone on the coasts of Mauritius, Mozambique and South Africa. Investigators say that these locations match the pattern of ocean currents. However, the task of working backwards and trying to establish where the plane could have actually hit the water is daunting.
The search covers an area larger than Hail Province and involves looking for the flight data and cockpit voice recorder that are about the same size as four shoe boxes. But the probes that are searching for these tiny objects relative to such a huge area must also negotiate a mountainous seabed with canyons and crevices into which they could have tumbled.
Every sympathy must be extended to those who lost loved ones on MH370. Two years on from the tragedy, they will have to acknowledge that they will never have complete closure for their grief. But the international airline industry and the authorities that regulate it need to be taking some firm steps. For some reason, the transponder which was tracking the flight of the Malaysian airliner ceased to work. The suspicion has to be that it was turned off. Thus the only way of following the plane was via ground radar and the intermittent engine status reports sent out automatically.
The International Civil Aviation Organization, a UN body, wants by November 2018 all aircraft traveling over open ocean to report their position every 15 minutes and by 2021 all new airliners should have autonomous trackers. But these steps are clearly not enough.
With all the advanced technology now available, there can be no more mysteries like flight MH370. The evidence of the flight recorders may never be available, but the evidence of this tragedy is there for all to see. It is impossible to understand how the authorities can ever again allow a commercial airliner to go missing. Automatic tracking was first proposed after the horror of 9/11. Astonishingly nothing was done about it. All aircraft should now be forced to carry automatic tracking, that cannot be compromised.
