Last summer, after more than a year of searching, a single piece of debris from Malaysia Airline’s MH370 aircraft was finally located on the coast of Madagascar. That flaperon was all we’ve found since MH370 vanished — until now.
Mozambique officials have confirmed that they found a piece of aircraft skin believed to have come from the horizontal stabilizer. The object has the words “NO STEP” written on it, and experts who have viewed the wreckage claim a high possibility that it’s from a Boeing 777. Mozambique officials have cautioned against confirmation until the part is positively identified, but Boeing tracks every single part of every single 777 it builds and there’s no known cases of a 777 shedding hardware in this area. If the part is confirmed to be from a Boeing 777, it’s almost certainly from MH370.
Where did all the debris go?
One persistent question that pops up whenever MH370 is discussed is why we can’t find the plane. The Australians and Malaysians have searched for nearly two years without success, while an enormous flotilla of ships assisted in the initial recovery effort. No debris was found, while in other cases, rescuers have found thousands of pieces of debris floating on the surface after a crash.
The answer may depend on the angle at which MH370 entered the water. Last year, a math professor at Texas A&M proposed that the aircraft could have survived a water landing (mostly) in one piece if it entered the water in a nose dive. The wings (and the horizontal stabilizers) would still have broken up, but the fuselage contains the cargo, humans, seats, cushions, and other objects that would have floated to the surface and alerted humans to the wreck. If the aircraft sank in one piece, very little of this material would escape the plane.
Most planes don’t hit the water in a nose dive, but impact at a steep angle. This creates what Professor Chen characterized as a “bending moment,” as the nose of the fuselage encounters sudden resistance. Such an impact would snap the fuselage into at least two pieces, and leave an enormous floating debris field.
The wings break off in either scenario, but in the nosedive scenario they’re more likely to shear off and remain mostly intact. In this scenario we would still expect to find some floating debris, but not the enormous cloud of it that previous aircraft crashes have generated.
As for how likely a nose-dive scenario is in the real world, I don’t honestly know. The current theory is that the aircraft flew, possibly on autopilot, until running out of fuel. Main power would have failed at that point, though an emergency generator is thought to have kicked on long enough for the aircraft to briefly communicate with orbiting satellites.
It’s not clear if the autopilot on a Boeing 777 can resume control of the plane once emergency power is restored, or if the hardware is programmed to attempt to control the aircraft in emergency situations. If the autopilot could hold the nose of the plane up as it descended, the vertical entry theory seems less plausible. If, on the other hand, the autopilot either wasn’t engaged or couldn’t respond in this scenario, a vertical dive seems much more likely.
Either way, we now (probably) have two pieces of debris washed ashore in the same part of the world. The Paluma Sandbank and Reunion Island are roughly 1,400 miles (2,400km) apart from each other, but both artifacts could possibly have been delivered by the currents of the Indian ocean.
It’s not clear if the horizontal stabilizer will help us solve the puzzle of what happened to MH370, but the more wreckage we locate, the greater the chance of uncovering clues to the plane’s current location and how it was destroyed.