Malaysia Flight 370 still holds public fascination over a year after its tragic and mysterious demise on their way to Beijing, China from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia last March. Air traffic control lost the flight without a trace under an hour after take-off. There were 239 heads on-board.
Maybe Malaysia Flight 370 Did Not Smash Apart
A mathematician and his international team of researchers (from Texas A&M University, Penn State, Virginia Tech, MIT and the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute) pose a new theory in hopes of solving the mystery of how we lost Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. Employing a supercomputer, they were able to determine that the Boeing 777 probably took a nosedive into the Indian Ocean. The dive was likely to have been at a steep angle, nearly vertical. At that sharp an angle, the plane would not have smashed apart because it would have collided into the ocean with the least resistance that way. If this theory is actually the way it happened, then Malaysia Flight 370 must have sunken deep into the ocean fully in tact.
Supercomputer Allows For Simulation of Scenarios
Using their mathematician’s dream supercomputer, they were able to simulate five scenarios (like that scene in Titanic). They even simulated a gliding water entry similar to Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the heroic pilot who landed an emergency landing in New York City’s Hudson River, saving the heads 155 on-board US Airways 1549. Of course, that scenario would be quite an amazing miracle for Malaysia Flight 370; unfortunately, the most plausible theory is that the Malaysian Airlines plane entered the water at a very vertical angle.
In a press release, Goong Chen, of Texas A&M University at Qatar opines that the “final moments of MH370 are likely to remain a mystery until someday when its black box is finally recovered and decoded. But forensics strongly supports that MH370 plunged into the ocean in a nosedive.”
A Very Frustrating Search
The search for Malaysia flight 370, led my Australia, was the most expensive search in aviation history (even beating out Amelia Earhart’s), covering 120,000 sq. km. However, little has been found at all. Searchers had wondered why there was almost no debris whatsoever, nor oil floating around the ocean’s surface in the highly searched Southeast Asian areas. Normally, what happens is that when a plane crashes into the ocean: wings may break off, and loads of debris appear or sink to the ocean’s bottom. In the case of Malaysia flight 370, the buoyant objects like foam seat cushions, seatback tables and plastic drinking bottles did were nowhere to be found.
The researchers explain in their report, “if an aircraft stalls in a climb, or if any control surfaces—ailerons, rudder, or stabilizers— malfunction, or if it runs out of fuel and the autopilot stops working, it can fall into a steep nose-dive or even vertical drop.” The mathematicians involved in this study published their findings in the April’s Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
