MH370: Plane may be intact on seafloor, says expert

KUALA LUMPUR - The massive search team scouring the Indian Ocean for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may find the Boeing jetliner intact on the seabed.

Scientists from Malaysia and Australia, who have been sifting through and analysing the data gathered to date, believe that the search team are also pursuing this theory.

"Based on the findings so far and based on the absence of a debris field on the surface, search-and-recovery crews are looking increasingly at the possibility that the aircraft is intact on the ocean floor," said Professor Dr Mohd Fadzil Mohd Akhir, head of the Laboratory of Geology and Physical Oceanography of Universiti Malaysia Terengganu.

Fadzil, an expert in geology and physical oceanography, is working closely with a fellow professor, Charitha Pattiaratchi, from the University of Western Australia, Perth, in analysing data on the missing plane. They have about half a decade of experience between them.

Pattiaratchi is the university's School of Environmental Systems Engineering head. He is also a coastal oceanography expert, who has conducted extensive research on the Indian Ocean.

Fadzil and Pattiaratchi are part of a group of experts and scientists collating and analysing data on the missing jetliner. They are in consultation with other experts looking at the case.

Fadzil said these scientists and experts, some of whom are privy to specific information shared only amongst high-level personnel in the search team, were looking at this possibility.

"This group of scientists and experts came to this (that the plane is intact) following their in-depth analysis of the case."

Fadzil said if the airplane had broken up on impact, the search team would have detected identifiable floating debris on the surface of the ocean by now.

"If the plane had disintegrated on impact, even into just two parts, items from the plane, including the seats and life jackets, would have been seen on the surface of the ocean."

Authorities heading the search had said they were confident of finding the plane in about two months after they started deploying the Bluefin-21 autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV).

This is despite initial calculations, which showed that the search would take about four years, based on the colossal search area of 60,000 square kilometres.

Fadzli told the New Straits Times that the search team was looking for the plane within a five to 10km search radius.

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"The triangulation from the four pings had helped greatly in considerably narrowing down the search area. It is now a much easier task for the search team. If the plane had disintegrated, any object on the seabed could either be parts of the plane or debris from the massive garbage patch in the Indian Ocean."

Images of the seabed showed that the Indian Ocean was littered with sunken vessels, cargo containers, metal casings, canned drinks and food, as well as crates and furniture.

Meanwhile, experts say if the plane were to be found intact on the seafloor, the images of MH370 captured would be similar to that of the RMS Titanic resting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Bluefin-21, they said, should be hovering about 30m from the seabed, so that it could best capture images. It does not need light for scanning, as it uses a sidescan sonar to generate a sonar picture of the target area.

Meanwhile, Department of Civil Aviation principal Assistant Director Noor Izhar Baharin said Bluefin-21 did not detect anything significant as of last night. Izhar was sent by Kuala Lumpur to Perth to facilitate and assist in the search operations.

He told the NST that all parties involved in the search were "pretty confident" that they were mapping the right area and that the team was heavily dependent on data from Bluefin-21.

"It takes time to analyse all the data gathered, as the AUV scans thousands of miles of seafloor, which is littered with all kinds of garbage you can think of."

Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday that wreck hunter David Mearns, director of Blue Water Recoveries, was confident that MH370's black box would be located soon.

He said the four pings detected were in the right spectrum of noise coming from the black box and that they could not be from anything else. Mearns said the search team and officials might have already found the wreck site, but were being cautious for the sake of the families of the passengers and crew.

"Essentially, they have found the wreck site. I think they will wait for Bluefin-21 to bring back photographic proof before announcing it."

He said analysis of the flight path, the four sonar acoustic signals detected and an oil slick found on Monday were among "a number of positive indications", allowing the search team to refine the search area further.

"Somewhere out of some place, fantastic pieces of intelligence were put together to really narrow that down to a small, small area, and that is how these guys have been able to find it so quickly," Mearns was quoted as saying.