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| Chief coordinator of the JACC speaking to the media about the difficult tasks involved in finding missing MAS flight MH370. - Reuters pic, April 1, 2014. |
With the hunt for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 entering its fourth week, the head of the search operations in Australia has raised the possibility that the plane's wreckage may never be found.
This is because authorities have a very poor understanding about how fast or far the plane travelled, reported The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH).
Air Chief Marshal (Rtd) Angus Houston told reporters that searching for the aircraft was comparable to the disappearance of HMAS Sydney, which took 60 years to locate.
HMAS Sydney, an Australian navy vessel, sank off the coast of Western Australia during World War II. The wreck of the ship was only found in 2008 despite eye-witnesses saying they saw the ship disappear over the horizon.
"We have a starting point and we need to pursue the search with vigour and we need to do that for some time to come,” Houston, who is the former head of Australia's Defence Forces, said of the ongoing search for MH370.
“Inevitably, if we don't find wreckage on the surface, we are probably eventually going to have to, in consultation with everybody who has a stake in this, review what we do next.”
Hopes of a breakthrough had been raised after the Australian Maritime Safety Authority revealed a new search area about 1,100 kilometres northeast of the previous zones on Friday.
This was after data analysis found that the plane had been travelling faster than previously thought, and would therefore have burnt more fuel and crashed earlier.
But Houston, head of the new Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC), said this analysis – described last week as the “most credible” lead to date – was a “very inexact science”, reported SMH.
“We don't know what altitude the aircraft was travelling at. We don't really know the speed it was going,” he said.
He said the ground speed of a plane travelling at sea level was half that of a plane travelling at 40,000 feet even if both aircraft had “the same indicated airspeed”.
Houston is a former chief of Air Force and aviator who spent much of his career as a search and rescue helicopter pilot, the SMH report said.
Houston is expected to brief Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, who is scheduled to arrive in Perth tomorrow.
Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein had said that Najib had also wanted to visit the Pearce Air Force in Perth base to thank the multinational personnel involved in the operation.
Meanwhile, Captain Allison Norris, commander of HMAS Success, told Fairfax Media that conditions were rough today with high winds and swell of up to four metres.
Nonetheless, her crew were scouring the ocean around the clock, using all available personnel on the vessel regardless of their normal jobs.
The crew, she told SMH, were also using night vision equipment when it was dark.
None of the objects found so far in the sea off Perth or Australia have been linked to MH370.
Hishammuddin had reiterated that Malaysia will not give up searching for the missing aircraft, which is believed to have crashed into the Indian Ocean, with all 239 people on board.
"This is a promise that Malaysia intends to keep. We will continue searching, and we will keep investigating, and we will never give up until we find out what happened to MH370," he had said. – April 1, 2014.
