Investigators from France, the only country still conducting a judicial inquiry into the doomed Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing which vanished on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board, has released some shocking data. As per the latest report after the investigators gained access to "crucial" flight data, the pilot of MH370 was in control of the plane “until the end”.
This increases the suspicions that he crashed into the sea in a murder-suicide. The revelations based on Boeing data came after a new account suggested that the Pilot may have been clinically depressed, leading him to starve the passengers of oxygen and then crash the Boeing 777 into the sea.
Malaysian government has time and again refuted any claims of pilot being involved in the vanishing of the plane which became one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries. The last official report generated by investigators was in July last year, and the 495-page report said that the plane's controls were probably deliberately manipulated to take it off course.
France is looking into the deaths of three French passengers, the wife and two children of Ghyslain Wattrelos - an engineer who met the judges on Wednesday. According to Le Parisien, Boeing had finally granted them access late May to vital flight data at the plane maker’s headquarters in Seattle.
It will take “a year” to sift through all the data and “nothing permits us to say the pilot was involved,” according to the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Marie Dosé. However, French investigators cited by Le Parisien said the data “lends weight’ to the idea that “someone was behind the control stick when the plane broke up in the Indian Ocean”.
It cited a source close to the inquiry as saying someone was flying the plane "until the end." “Certain abnormal turns made by the 777 can only have been carried out manually. Someone was in control," the source was cited as saying.
Earlier scientists claimed to have identified a potential crash site of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 using a new mathematical approach to analyse how debris moves around the ocean. Over USD 150 million has been spent so far to identify where the plane carrying 239 passengers crashed into the Indian Ocean, with no success.
An international team of researchers, including those from the University of Miami in the US, used what are known as Markov chain models to narrow down a potential crash location substantially north of the region where most search efforts have concentrated.
A Markov chain model predicts the behaviour of complicated systems by determining the probability of each outcome from the current state of what is being studied.
They have been used to power Google search algorithms and model financial markets. In the study, published in the journal Chaos, the group used data from the Global Drifters Program, a publicly available dataset that uses satellites to track spherical buoys as the ocean's currents, waves and wind push them along paths over time.
In true Markovian fashion, each aimless buoy's next turn is an independent event from every other movement it has made in the past, researchers said.
The buoys were then placed on a grid with more than 3,000 virtual squares to simulate where plane debris would float to.
"Surprisingly, after more than three years, there is only a handful of confirmed debris recovered from the airplane," said Philippe Miron from University of Miami.
"This increases the errors of the model," said Miron, the lead author on the paper based on the research.
Seasonal variation in the Indian Ocean also required the team to develop three separate models to accurately predict debris movement during the protracted search effort.
"The monsoon in the Indian Ocean has important effects on the circulation of the region," Miron said in a statement.
After the analysis, the team's estimated search area was from 33 to 17 degrees south latitude along the arc of the last satellite to contact the downed plane, whose northern edge has remained largely unscrutinised.
Miron said he hopes the group's approach will encourage future efforts to deploy more trackable devices in the ocean to provide more data to solve similarly vexing problems.
He looks to use mathematical models to further understand how drifting objects move in the ocean, including the flow of hydrocarbons following undersea oil spills.
With Inputs from AFP Relaxnews
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