Kuala Lumpur, March 26- After Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Monday that Flight MH370 had gone down in the Indian Ocean with its 239 passengers and crew, citing new satellite data analysis, the focus of the search is now on recovering the black box from the depths of the vast Indian Ocean.
However, experts maintain that it may not solve one of aviation’s greatest mysteries.
According to the latest theory, the passenger jet crashed in the waters after veering far from its intended course. But its exact location and the circumstances of its diversion remain a mystery. No distress signal was ever received.
Now experts say even the black box, if recovered, may not help them know what caused the plane to turn after it took off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing on March 8 and embark on a baffling journey to the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean.
According to experts, the cockpit voice recorder – which could reveal what decisions were made by those at the helm and why – retains only the last two hours of conversations before the plane’s demise.
That means crucial exchanges surrounding the initial diversion, which took place halfway between Malaysia and Vietnam, will be lost.
The data recorder details the aircraft’s path and other mechanical information for the flight’s duration.
“Clearly, it won’t reveal anything that happened over the Gulf of Thailand – this will have been overwritten by the end of MH370,” US-based aviation consultancy firm Leeham Co said in a commentary.
According a news report by AFP, it also remains to be seen whether the cockpit recorder will contain anything pertinent about the plane’s final two hours, when it is believed to have either ditched or run out of fuel.
The agency quoted Paul Yap, an aviation lecturer at Singapore’s Temasek Polytechnic, as saying that if the black box is not found, “chances are we are never going to find out what really happened”.
“With the new satellite data, I think we can say it is a chessboard,” he said of the wide search area.
“The question now is to find which grid on that chessboard to focus on, where the black boxes are.”
-Indiatoday
