A little over 400 days since the disappearance of the ill-fated Malaysian Airlines flight MH 370 on March 8, 2014, a single wreckage has yet to be found by rescue authorities from Malaysia, Australia, and China.
But instead of being downhearted by the futile search, the authorities from the three countries have renewed their commitment to finding the plane or at least a wreckage of it by expanding the search area to include a good part of the vast Indian Ocean corridor, notes Yahoo! News from an AFP report.
In a meeting held in Kuala Lumpur on April 16, ministers from the three countries disclosed that the deep-sea zone is now also being searched for signs of the ill-fated Malaysian Airlines jet, which officially expanded the search zone to 120,000 square kilometers if and when the current search area turns up still empty.
Expanding it to highest probability area
Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai revealed that if the aircraft is not found within the current 60,000 square kilometers of search area, they have agreed to further expand the search to another 60,000 square kilometers within the highest-probability area.
By they, Liow Tiong Lai means himself as well as Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss and China’s Minister of Transport Yang Chuantang.
Flight MH 370 with 239 passengers onboard disappeared on its flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, creating one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries and fuelling a massive international effort to locate it.
Renewed hopes
Early in March this year, new reports came out that a Malaysian Airlines-branded hand towel that was still in its packaging found in a beach by a couple 200 kilometers north of Perth in Western Australia could actually renew hopes for the still ongoing search for the missing plane on the Australian coast.
But it turns out that the small paper towel with the Malaysian Airlines branding on it was discovered by Kingsley and Vicki Miller of the nearby town called Cervantes while they were walking on the beach as early as July 2014. It was subsequently sent to Canberra for testing.
At that time, officials of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau were already saying that it is unlikely that the towel might be of good use in finding the remains of the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777, some four months after its disappearance.
About 60% of the initial suspected crash area for MH 370 has already been search in the Australian-led high-tech effort to scan the ocean floor.
A few weeks ago, Australian authorities have issued a statement saying that the search is expected to be completed in May, which only worried the relatives of the victims because they believe that the expensive and very challenging operation would end after that and they would also be left in quandary as to what really happened to their relatives onboard the ill-fated flight MH370. Most of the passengers of the MH 370 were Chinese.
I have the MOST PLAUSIBLE conspiracy theory of them all, and despite my having posted it online many times, no one seems to be giving it any consideration. Here it is again:
The MH370 pilot goes rogue, switches off tracking systems, and drops beneath the radar while still in Malaysian airspace. The pilot negotiates with the Malaysian government about releasing the hostages and returning the plane – perhaps to secure the release of the opposition leader he supports – and lands in some closed airport IN MALAYSIA! Clumsily obscuring the facts while attempting to manage the crisis, Malaysian officials spin misinformation repeatedly, and when it is revealed that the satellite pinger has continued to be tracked for eight hours and locates the plane on an arc from Antarctica to Pakistan, everyone assumes the plane headed over the south Indian Ocean and crashed.
But THE 8 HOUR ARC ALSO PASSES RIGHT THROUGH MALAYSIA! To allow the Malaysian government to continue to hide their dirty little secret, the world goes searching for the plane off the coast of Australia. But the plane might really have been hidden away in a hanger at the Langkawi International Airport on the Malacca Straight – with the hostages – IN MALAYSIA!
Actually, the most plausible theory is that it flew off into the middle of nowhere, crashed into the sea, and we haven’t found it because no one’s ever charted that part of the south Indian Ocean. There’s never been a reason to–no one in their right mind goes there. It’s not been useful for anything since the age of the clipper ships, which used to sail right into those seas because of the powerful west-to-east current. The same current that would have quickly swept any debris away from the crash site in the few days before the satellite data indicated that’s where the plane went.
It took almost two years to find Air France 447 when it went down at a known location not far off the coast of Brazil, and people think that finding something that crashed at an indeterminate location in the middle of uncharted, rough seas at or near the Antarctic Convergence is going to be easy?