MALAYSIA - 6mths After Disappearance of Flight MH370

"Will flight tracking evolve in wake of Malaysia Air mystery?" PBS NewsHour 10/8/2014

Excerpt

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  Now the continuing search for a missing jetliner that captured the attention of the world.

More than six months ago, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 mysteriously disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, triggering a massive search.  The plane was thought to have crashed somewhere in or near the Southern Indian Ocean with 239 people on board.  A nearly two-month-long search for wreckage and clues proved futile, yielding no definitive answers about just what happened to the plane.  It’s been months, but now the search is back on.

Jeffrey Brown has more.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  The break gave investigators time to create a kind of map of the understood water seabed, and the search resumed on Monday.  Three ships will be involved in this next phase, which could last as long as a year.

Last spring, ships and planes from 14 countries served vast areas of the South China Sea and other regions.

Tonight’s “NOVA” focuses on the continuing investigation and many questions that remain and the technology of tracking planes.

Our science correspondent, Miles O’Brien, is the producer and reporter for the report titled “Why Planes Vanish” and he joins me from Boston.

So, Miles, as the search restarts, where do things stand?  What exactly are they focused on now?

MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour):  Well, they’re focused on a very big area.

And, Jeff, it’s hard not to say that we’re sort of still at square one on this one.  And that’s an amazing thing to say so many months after the loss of MH370.  The search zone has been defined by some ingenious mathematics.  Essentially, engineers in this company Inmarsat, which operates communications satellites, which was part of what was equipped on MH370, were able to turn a communications capability into a positioning tool and were able to define this location in the Southern Indian Ocean as a search zone for the flight, which flew on seven hours after it disappeared from radar screens.

But we know it’s in that hemisphere by virtue of this mathematics, but it’s in a very, very big region, a big swathe.  They can’t define a bullseye.  So we have got to be ready for a long search here.