It began with confusion and ended with a shrug. After nearly three years, the joint Chinese, Australian and Malaysian deep ocean search for the missing Malaysian airliner, flight MH370, .
Despite harnessing the best drone submarines available and searching 120,000 square kilometres of the Indian Ocean, the fuselage of the vanished Boeing 777 with 239 people on board has not turned up.
It is a crushing blow to the families and friends of the passengers and crew who long for an explanation. But the investigation was dogged early on by misinformation. The fact that the search has not yet produced any kind of closure for the relatives will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the case.
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The tragedy began in the early hours of 8 March 2014. The airliner took off from Kuala Lumpur shortly before 1 am and headed north for Beijing 鈥� but air traffic controllers heard nothing more from the crew after 1.19 am. The plane鈥檚 radar transponder mysteriously ceased broadcasting its GPS position and identity code at 1.22 am.
When the flight failed to make contact as expected, a massive air and sea search began in the South China Sea. That was rendered pointless after a few days when older Malaysian military radar 鈥� that bounces signals off aircraft without needing transponders to identify them 鈥� showed that the plane had turned west.
As a later satellite analysis by UK-based Inmarsat would show, it then headed south over the Indian Ocean towards Antarctica and beyond radar range. The assumption is that it crashed into the ocean around 2500 kilometres west of Perth, Australia, when the fuel ran out.
The mystery deepened when Malaysian authorities said that the aircraft had not transmitted any of its normal in-flight maintenance data, known as ACARS signals. However, 快猫短视频 discovered that the engine-maker Rolls-Royce, which can monitor the health of all its engines wirelessly from its base in the UK, had received at least two ACARS messages from the plane before it disappeared. Getting accurate information from the airline remains an issue.
Even so, hopes of finding MH370 were high at first because a similar search for Air France flight 447, which crashed in the mid-Atlantic in 2009, was eventually successful in 2011 thanks to autonomous submarines.
Theories, theories
Those of us commentating on the Malaysian case confidently predicted that this would probably be repeated with MH370 鈥� but we were wrong. With only seven satellite pings after 1.22 am to go on, the position of the doomed Boeing has not been precisely ascertained. Many expert as to where it might be.
Theories of what happened to the plane soon sprouted. They included a hijacking by the co-pilot or the captain 鈥� the latter having been a supporter of a Malaysian government opponent arrested the day before. A lithium battery fire in the hold was also mooted. But a more likely explanation remains a rapid depressurisation of the aircraft (the cause of a Greek airline disaster in 2005) that rendered the crew unconscious.
Some parts of the plane 鈥� external ones easily broken up on impact 鈥� have been found. Caught in Indian Ocean currents, they have washed up in East Africa, with a major wing part called a flaperon found on Reunion Island and a 2-metre piece of wing flap in Tanzania. A sliver of an internal fuselage partition was found, too, hinting that the body of the plane may have disintegrated, making the deep ocean search harder.
Which brings us to yesterday鈥檚 announcement. The transport ministers of Malaysia, China and Australia expressed sadness at the decision to call off the search 鈥渄espite every effort using the best science available, cutting edge technology, as well as modelling and advice from highly skilled professionals鈥�.
Aviation safety improves by gleaning knowledge as a result of incidents and accidents. And while the exact cause of this disaster is not known, many lessons have been learned and must continue to be learned, such as the need for constant airplane position tracking over remote parts of oceans and for longer-lasting, louder, underwater acoustic pingers to help a post-crash search.
Action is under way already: on 14 January, SpaceX launched 10 satellites that will make that constant tracking possible, via a global service called Aireon.
Of course, none of this will be of the slightest comfort to the relatives and friends of the missing. For them, the anguish goes on.
