Latest News On Missing Jet, The case of the missing plane remains an excruciating mystery, and the only thing authorities are saying with confidence is that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went south instead of north, flying almost halfway to Antarctica before crashing somewhere in a remote expanse of the southern Indian Ocean.
Even that conclusion, which is problematically vague for searchers, is propped up by delicate satellite data that required two weeks of interpretation. Small changes in initial assumptions about the plane’s speed produce large differences — many hundreds of miles — in the calculated outcomes.
Debris in that lightly traveled expanse of ocean has been sighted by satellites and aircraft, but there is no evidence that it has any connection to the missing plane. Military searchers in surveillance aircraft are battling brutal weather; clouds are hampering satellite searches and NASA’s efforts to spot debris with a camera on the international space station.
Time is precious. Military vessels are on the way with instruments that could pick up the ping of the aircraft’s “black box” flight data recorder on the sea floor, but the pinger’s batteries typically last only 30 days.
“This is really uncharted territory. Usually you have plenty of data to work with — black boxes, voice recorder and lots of satellite telemetry. Everyone is working pretty much in the blind,” said Scott Madry, a satellite expert at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France.
The jetliner, a red-eye from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard, vanished March 8 with no hint of distress or any sign of an explosion or hijacking. Radar picked up signs of the plane turning around and heading west, back across the Malaysian peninsula into the Strait of Malacca.
There are many scenarios for what happened in that first hour after takeoff, ranging from a fire to a sudden decompression to a hijacking to a diversion carried out by a member of the crew. There is still no solid evidence supporting any particular narrative.
There is, however, a new consensus among investigators that the plane turned again sharply to the south and, for whatever reason, flew steadily across the uninhabited reaches of the open ocean until it ran out of fuel and crashed.