Discovering a piece of Flight 370 won’t help investigators find the rest
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Version 0 of 1. While confidence increased Friday that a piece of airplane wing that washed ashore on an Indian Ocean island this week belonged to an airliner that disappeared more than 16 months ago, the discovery will provide little help to those searching for the remains of the 239 people on board, an expert said. The engines and main cabin of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 are believed to have sunk quickly after the Boeing 777 crashed somewhere in the vast Indian Ocean. The piece found by beach cleaners on remote Reunion Island has been identified as part of a wing that floated for more than 500 days. [Debris examined for possible link to missing Malaysia Airlines plane] “Is it going to help us make the haystack smaller? I don’t think so,” said David Gallo of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “The biggest impact is the emotional one: that the plane is not sitting on some runway in Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan but actually ended up in the Indian Ocean.” Gallo led a team from Woods Hole that located the wreckage of another plane that crashed into the ocean, Air France Flight 447. Though investigators had a significantly better idea of where that plane went down, narrowing the search area to about 40 square miles, the search took almost two years. “With Air France, we had a lot of debris on the surface of the ocean, and they were retro-drifted 80 miles backward to where the modelers thought the plane hit the water,” Gallo said. “They were absolutely wrong about the retro-drift modeling, even though [the debris] was in the water only a couple of weeks. The modeling led us on a wild-goose chase out in the middle of nowhere where there was nothing.” Flight 370 went radically off course en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, vanishing from radar screens and ending radio contact. Investigators used satellite echoes and other means to conclude that it flew to a remote area well off the coast of Western Australia before running out of fuel and crashing into the sea. [Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappearance ruled an accident] In May, as winter set in on the Indian Ocean, the search was expanded from a 23,000-square mile piece of the ocean to one covering 46,000 square miles — about the size of Pennsylvania. Reunion is about 2,800 miles from the search area, Gallo said, a distance the flotsam easily could have covered. “If you just say 3,000 miles, it’s about 500 days,” he calculated. “Three thousand miles in 500 days is about six miles a day. That’s about a quarter of a mile an hour for a current to move it, so that’s very doable.” Indian Ocean currents run counter-clockwise in a pattern that could carry debris from the suspected crash site to Reunion Island. “The current is not like a conveyor belt or a merry-go-round or a lazy susan,” Gallo said. “It’s a convoluted mass of swirls, eddies, and they’ve gone through a couple of monsoon seasons, a couple of typhoons, I believe, so I’m sure the course has been anything but smooth.” Tracing the path of a piece of aircraft back to the crash site would be virtually impossible, he said. “The idea that you can take something over 500 days and move it backwards over 3,000 miles, I’m not sure that’s going to help us understand where better to [look],” Gallo said. The French aviation investigation agency, which has taken the wing because Reunion is a French possession, will study the marine growth the piece acquired while drifting through the ocean. Different types of marine life live in distinct sections of the ocean, so what’s attached to the wing may help plot its path. Only five Boeing 777s have been destroyed, with Flight 370 the only one lost over ocean. But proof that the wing is from Flight 370 will not help investigators narrow their search for the rest of the plane or the remains of those on board, Gallo said. “The main thing about this is the emotional impact, because it’s the first tangible evidence that Malaysian Air 370 ended its journey in the Indian Ocean. For the sake of the families, this is huge impact on their emotions,” he said. “For the sake of the teams that are out there mapping, I can tell you that actually knowing there is a plane somewhere in the area will give them a big boost of energy. After spending months and months and months out there and finding nothing, I’m sure this will give them a big boost.” Read more: Malaysian plane may have flown for four hours after going missing, U.S. officials say Officials Begin to Identify Bodies in Air France Crash as Search Goes On The scale of the search for Flight 370 Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world |