“There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them.” – Louis Armstrong
Reports on CNN (TV) that debris has washed up on an island near Madagascar. Here is the link.
I must say, that looks extremely likely that it’s from MH370.
That’s a wing flap, all right. And where else could it have come from?
The piece is large enough to have a serial number, so expect confirmation very soon.
There’s a lot of aircraft debris around the world, even from big craft. It does look far more modern than, say, WWII construction, but it’s not impossible that it’s from some other lost aircraft, or even a known crash/loss.
But it’s cool to think we might have found the flight.
Even if the part is later proven to have come off MH370, I’d hardly say that means “we’ve found the flight.”
What we’ve found is that one piece of debris. Which strongly favors the idea that it went down somewhere on the world’s oceans, which was already a 70/30 shot before we know anything else. Other than that we’ve not learned much.
Oceanographers may be able to do some retrodicting based on currents to determine a likely area of impact. Or at least to rule out some areas, e.g. the North Atlantic, based on transit time since the flight disappeared.
And depending on the pattern of damage the accident gurus may be able to say a few things about whether the part came off the jet in the air or at impact or …
Beyond that we won’t learn much if this piece is all there is.
And the CTers will still be able to say the jet was diverted by IS (or whoever) to Myanmar (or Kazahkstan or wherever) and this part was just planted in the sea for us to find.
All in all this is interesting, but I wouldn’t pin too much hope on this solving the bigger mystery.
You don’t think this would narrow the search box to something searchable? How far could it have drifted in a year…
They “just” need to narrow it down to an area that for an affordable amount of money, they can lawnmower it with sonar with sufficient sensor resolution to find the aircraft. Then, once they find it, find the flight data recorders. I wonder if they can survive a year at ocean pressure…
I was under the impression that without the satellite telemetry, and without finding any confirmed debris, the aircraft’s fuel range meant it could have gone thousands of miles. There is a gigantic area it could have ended up in. Various assumptions were made in an attempt to narrow it down but this was not successful.
Oceans are pretty darned big. What did it take to find the Titanic? 70 years or so? And they knew essentially where she sank.
As **Leaffan **said.
Stuff drifts based on winds and currents. I know exactly zero about the currents in the Southern Ocean & Indian Ocean, but there are experts who do know that stuff.
Assuming the item came from MH370, it’s been in the water for 15 months. That’s ~11,000 hours. If you assume 3 knots of current + wind on average it theoretically could have drifted to that island from any point on the planet. Wind & current knowledge may reduce that some, but only with ginourmous error bars.
These really great underwater sonar scanning machines have survey swathes a couple hundred feet across. And they move at a couple knots, tops. To cover a square mile of sea floor takes roughly a day if all goes well.
I’m not thinking this discovery is going to do much beyond, as I said, increasing the confidence it’s in an ocean someplace and not in the jungle.
Airline debris drifts with the currents. Sunken Liners … less so.
Wasn’t there a Yemenia Airways flight that went down sort of in that area a few years ago? Seems like the debris could easily be from that. It was an Airbus A310 and MH370 was obviously a Boeing 777, so it shouldn’t be hard to differentiate.
Obviously the C.I.A. planted this debris to keep attention from focusing on the secret hangar where MH370 and all its passengers are being kept along with the missing people from 9/11, Bigfoot and the Lindbergh baby.
Well then it HAS to be MH370, doesn’t it? There have only been 5 hull loss accidents with Boeing 777’s in aviation history and the other four were over land: two crash landings short of runways, a cockpit fire at the gate, and a missile strike. If it’s debris from a B777 (not going to take this anonymous official’s word based on a photo as gospel), there’s no other flight it could possibly be.
This whole thing has been really shady and weird. From looking at and reading about this plane all morning, it seems most likely to me that it would have crashed into the Bay of Bengal. I mean, after an hours reading, I asked myself “Well, why haven’t they searched the Bay of Bengal for it?”. Upon doing a search, I’ve seen several links, and all of them not being really clear on why the Bay of Bengal wasn’t searched,…most were links where Australia (of all countries, for some reason) were insisting that the plane cannot be in that Bay and that nobody is allowed to search there VS one or two scientists insisting that’s the only place it could be (same conclusion I came to) and who are wondering why nobody has searched there yet. One or two odd links were also about how the Malaysian government were, for some reason, suspiciously refusing to search the Bay of Bengal and even refusing to look at plane wreckage that was found there in the last year.
It’s just…puzzling. From possible eyewitness accounts, that’s where they saw the plane. Plus the plane was, you know, HEADING in that direction last time it was seen on any radar. Even if you don’t take into account any eyewitnesses, which could be faulty or made up, that’s the direction the plane was going in. So why did nobody think to search the Bay of Bengal? It’s just…very weird. Seriously, do a search of Malaysian plane Bay of Bengal and you’ll see it’s just odd all round.
But that seems like the only place, to me, where it could have gone.
ETA: Does THIS showing of where the plane went(via radar) look like it crashed anywhere near Australia the way THIS photo shows (from this article)? Not even close.
Something is really weird there.
Idle Thoughts, have a look at the Indian Ocean current maps. If it crash in the Bay of Bengal, it is very unlikely to have washed up on Reunion Island without lots of other bits washing up in other places first.
The west coast of Australia is far more consistent with this wreckage sighting than the Bay of Bengal is.
If you start from the assumption that the authorities are telling the truth as they understand it, then your assertion makes zero sense.
The last radar hit in that first link was not known for certain to actually be MH370. And the satellite ACARS data showed the airplane remained in the air for several hours after that point. So any time after that last radar hit, and even assuming that radar hit really was MH370, the aircraft could have changed course again and gone in any direction. Given the aircraft already had made several unexpected and unexplained course changes, there’s no reason to assume it must have proceeded in a straight line projection of the last two radar hits.
Assuming the folks who did the satellite data analysis are good at their jobs, they have established that arc on the ocean surface generally west of Australia where the jet was certain to have been at the time of the last ACARS ping received. And we know there was not another ping after that, so the maximum distance of travel was just under one hour in any direction from any point on that arc.
That’s the area that’s been searched once this data came to light a couple weeks or so after the disappearance. And none of that search space is in the Bay of Bengal.
Conversely, If you (any you) start from the assumption that the authorities are lying, or are utterly incompetent then damn near anything is possible. At which point there’s no point in discussing the topic since we have no basis for concluding that any particular lunatic crackpot theory is more accurate than any other lunatic crackpot theory.