Day 152 — Fugro has won the tender of MH370's search

Dutch engineering firm Fugro will lead the search of the Indian Ocean seafloor where missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is believed to have crashed, hoping to unlock the greatest mystery in modern aviation.

Australia on Wednesday awarded Fugro the lead commercial contract for the search, after months of hunting by up to two dozen countries revealed no trace of the missing Boeing 777.

Investigators say what little evidence they have to work with suggests the aeroplane was deliberately diverted thousands of kilometres before eventually crashing into the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.

The next phase of the search is expected to start within a month and take up to a year, focussing on a 60,000 sq km patch of ocean some 1,600 km west of Perth.

Australian Transport Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said Fugro was selected after "offering the best value-for-money technical solution" for the seafloor search.

"I remain cautiously optimistic that we will locate the missing aircraft within the priority search area," he told reporters in Canberra.

Fugro will use two vessels equipped with towed deep water vehicles carrying side scan sonar, multi beam echo sounders and video cameras to scour the seafloor, which is close to 5,000 m deep in places. Fugro will spend more than $52 million in the next year in the search for MH370.

The Dutch company is already conducting a detailed underwater mapping of the search area, along with a Chinese naval vessel.

"We haven't completed the mapping, so we are still discovering detailed features that we had no knowledge of, underwater volcanoes and various other things," said Martin Dolan, the head of the Australian Transport Safety Board, which is heading the search.

Day 129 — Suspicions of systems tampering

The independent researchers are now drawing attention to data that implies that the jet, with 239 people on board, flew in a circular or complex path for 52 minutes off the northern tip of Sumatra before then flying an apparently straight course southwards for more than four hours before running out of fuel off the Indian Ocean coast of Western Australia.

That previously unrecognized period of 62 minutes of untraced flight begins with a ‘strange’ message from the ACARS computer on board MH370 to an Inmarsat satellite consistent with there having been a temporary interruption to normal electrical power on the jet.

The next, and apparently normal standby signal exchange between MH370 and the satellite 73 minutes later occurs at a point calculated by the official investigation to be only 195 miles further northwest and immediately prior to the jet turning south.

However at the speed assumed by the official inquiry, MH370 would have covered that distance in a straight line in 21 minutes leaving 52 minutes of flight time unaccounted for.

Day 111 — New underwater search area announced

Australian officials released a 64-page report that concludes search operations should shift to an area 1,800 kilometers off the west coast of Australia.
Officials said they changed the search area after analyzing satellite data and that an underwater search would continue in the new area starting August. They also believe that the plane was on autopilot when it crashed.
"It is highly, highly likely that the aircraft was on autopilot otherwise it could not have followed the orderly path that has been identified through the satellite sightings," said Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss.
He announced a new high priority underwater search area for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. The new search area of up to 60,000 square kilometres is located in the Southern Indian Ocean and, like previous searches, is located along the seventh arc – a thin but long line that marks where the missing aircraft last communicated with a satellite.

Day 102 — New search area recommended

A group of 10 independent researchers released a statement detailing their findings and recommendations regarding a new search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. The scientists pored over the 45 pages of raw satellite data that Malaysian officials released last week, and conducted their own analysis to determine the most likely crash site of the doomed flight. Five separate computer models all place the plane in a tight cluster of spots in the south Indian Ocean — hundreds of miles southwest of the previous search site. "We recommend that the search for MH370 be focused in this area," the group said in a statement. "While there remain a number of uncertainties and some disagreements as to the interpretation of aspects of the data, our best estimates of a location of the aircraft (is) near 36.02 South 88.57 East," according to the statement, which was approved by 10 named experts.

Day 90 — The 7th arc

The latest information and analysis confirms that MH370 will be found in close proximity to the arc set out in the map and labelled as the 7th arc. At the time MH370 reached this arc, the aircraft is considered to have exhausted its fuel and to have been descending. As a result, the aircraft is unlikely to be more than 20 NM (38 km) to the west or 30 NM (55 km) to the east of the arc.

Refinement of the analysis in the coming weeks will reduce the underwater Search Area along this arc to a prioritised 17,500 sq. NM (60,000 sq. km). The prioritised length of the Search Area along the arc is expected to be 350 NM (650 km).