MH370: No disagreement on search area

Australia’s crash investigator has dismissed reports that there is disagreement among the expert teams that are calculating the search area for MH370.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) chief commissioner, Martin Dolan, said that there were two priority search areas for MH370 because the five teams had been using differing methodologies to calculate the likely flight paths of the aircraft based on satellite communications data.

The five teams are; Inmarsat from the UK, Boeing, Thales Group from France, the US investigator the National Transportation Safety Board, and the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation.

Mr Dolan said that earlier there had been consensus amongst the five groups, based on the data available at the time, but once the data had been refined, “the results from the methodologies did not coincide exactly. There is no disagreement, just the deliberate application of differing analysis models,” said Mr Dolan. “We have set out the details of this is a publicly available report.”

All teams agree the final resting place of the Boeing 777 is near to what is called the 7th arc which is curve that stretches from about 1000km off Exmouth to a point about 2000km south-west of Perth. Originally the five teams agreed that an area about 650km long by 90km wide due west of Perth was most likely.

A later report, released in early October, specified two high priority areas further to the south.

As a result, the ATSB increased its mapping of the sea floor to cover the more southerly sections of the arc and then allocated two search vessels to search the two priority areas that had been determined based on those analyses.

Mr Dolan said that although there is reasonably “high confidence” that the aircraft is in the defined priority search areas, this area does not include all the possible derived paths. 

And Mr Dolan added that further refinement and simulation assessment is continuing, although the likelihood of further significant change is low.“There is ongoing examination and analysis of the SATCOM data and end-of-flight scenarios or simulations which may affect the dimensions or flight path probabilities within the search area.”

There are three ships involved in the search, the Go Phoenix, Fugro Discovery and Fugro Equator.

The Go Phoenix is on station west-south-west of Perth south of the area called Broken Ridge. Fugro Discovery left Fremantle yesterday after resupply and will continue searching south-west of Perth, while Furgo Equator is still mapping, while new search equipment is delivered.

Over 6,900 sq km of the seafloor have been searched so far.

Seperately, the head of the worlld's lagest international airline, Sir Tim Clark claims there is a coverup over the disapperance of MH370.