Sometime last month, there were reports saying that the search operation for the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 shall be suspended indefinitely if nothing turns up by December.
However, because of the inclement weather conditions in the southern Hemisphere area where the search for the wreckage of the ill-fated Flight MH370 is ongoing, the search team decided to halt everything for the time being until the weather becomes conducive, which would likely resume in October.
The families of the victims of Flight MH370 took the news as a welcome development more than the announcement previously that the search will be suspended indefinitely.
Flight MH370 was laden with 239 passengers onboard during its flight from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to Beijing in China on March 8, 2014 and most of them were Chinese.
The families of the victims believe that they would not have a complete closure if the wreckage and perhaps the remains of their relatives are still not found.
With the decision to halt search operation late last month and to begin again in October, it seems that the previous announcement of a December deadline no longer sticks because the follow-up search operation is likely to extend beyond the end of this year.
A massive search that has not turned up anything
The massive search for the wreckage of Flight MH370 was supposed to end in July but without positive developments, the quest went on.
As of the end of August, 110,000 square kilometers of the total 120,000 square kilometers have already been covered by the search. According to a spokesperson from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is coordinating the search involving the governments of Australia, Malaysia, and China, they will just finish the target area and conclude the search if nothing turns up, reports Headlines & Global News.
However, the ATSB official did say that they will still probe some targets that were previously missed out by the search even after the end of the search.
The absence of new leads shall certainly compel the Australian, Malaysian, and Chinese authorities to end its $130 million search operation involving high-tech scanning at designated swaths of the sea floor in the Indian Ocean.
Latest reports have it that when the search operation resumes next month, the Chinese-owned search trawler Dong Hai Jiu 101, which can be controlled remotely, shall be joining the Maryland-based Phoenix International in scouring the area.
The last transmission from the plane
Ground investigators have already looked into the radar transmissions and pilot communications of Flight MH370 before it completely disappeared from radar.
There was a routine transmission from Flight MH370 at 1:07 am on March 8 which showed that it was on its normal route. Some 12 minutes later, one of the pilots of the plane was overheard saying ‘Good night. Malaysian three seven zero,’ to air traffic controllers as the plane moves from Malaysian to Vietnamese airspace, details Fox 6 Now.
Two more minutes later, the plane’s transponder which identifies the flight to air traffic controllers, stop communicating.
At around 1:28 am, the plane appeared to have changed course, making a sharp left turn. At around 2:15 am, radar tracks a plane traveling west, then making a turn either to the north or south. The rest was history and the hunt for its final descent continues to this day.
Even after the search, authorities will continue to look into other ways to be able to determine the cause of the accident.
Accordingly, after the search is done, efforts of the authorities shall focus on pin-point drift modeling, using the locations of washed up debris such as the flaperon found on Reunion Island last year.
Scientists will methodically map accurate drift patterns in order to determine a new precise location for a search zone.
In a recent statement by authorities, they said that 30 years of real-life Global Drifter Programme data will be used to model the drift of the flaperon.