Finding MH370

When the first piece of MH370 debris washed ashore on La Réunion in July, 2015, investigators immediately realized that creatures living on its surface -- a species of goose barnacle called Lepas anatifera -- could yield clues as to where the plane had crashed. There was a big problem, however: they didn't know how these barnacles really grow in the open ocean. A few days ago, a volunteer collected a scientific drifter buoy that was covered in these organisms, and in today's episode we discuss how they provide a new understanding of the aircraft debris and of the fate of the plane itself.

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Today I join Aaron Murphy at the uFly flight simulator near Toronto, Ontario. Our goal: to find out the absolute maximum distance it’s possible to glide a 777 after fuel exhaustion. That, in turn will let us set the boundaries on the universe of all possible place the plane could be. Not just where it’s likely to be, but where it definitely has to be, assuming in went into the ocean in the first place. If we search out this whole area, we’re guaranteed to find the plane. Or else to prove that investigator’s ironclad assumptions about the case were wrong from the start.

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Malaysia has said that Ocean Infinity can start searching again in November. But where will they look? The prospective search zone is relatively small, constrained by drift modeling, aircraft performance, and satellite data analysis. If the plane went into the southern Indian Ocean, it's all but guaranteed to be here. And if it isn't?

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In the second episode of a two-parter about this June's amazing discovery of a Pan Am DC-4 that lay in 2,000 feet of water off the coast of San Juan, Puerto Rico for 74 years, I talk with Tony Romeo, CEO of the underwater survey company Deep Sea Vision, whose HUGIN 6000 Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) detected the plane's wreckage on its first pass over the search area.

Tony talks about how he used the same equipment to search some 5,000 square miles in the middle of the Pacific for the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's plane, and explains how he would look for the wreckage of MH370.

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Finding a missing airliner on the seabed is something that's naturally going to be of great interest to anyone fascinated by the mystery of MH370, and today I’m going to be talking to someone who has done just that: Russ Matthews, President and Co-founder of the Air/Sea Heritage Foundation, who organized an expedition that this past June found a Pan Am passenger plane that had lain undiscovered on the seabed near Puerto Rico for more than 70 years. 

To learn more about the Air/Sea Heritage Foundation, visit their website at https://airseaheritage.org/.

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