Unveiling the Cutting-Edge Aviation Enigma Solution: Paving the Way for Unraveling Aviation's Biggest Puzzle
Planes shouldn't vanish without a trace. But that's exactly what happened to Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 on 8 March 2014. Vanished without a whisper, this Boeing 777 left us with more questions than answers.
The plane, bound for Beijing, disappeared from radar less than two hours after take-off from Kuala Lumpur. No main wreckage has ever been found, leaving us dangling with no leads. Not a single body of the 239 passengers was ever recovered, despite the most expensive aviation search in history.
Theories abound, from hijackings to pilots gone rogue, but no conclusive evidence has surfaced. No technical failure, distress call, or ransom demand has given us even the slightest clue. Australian, Chinese, and Malaysian authorities spent an estimated $130 million trying to find MH370 before calling off the search in 2017. To this day, the world is still grappling with the mystery of this ill-fated aircraft, and the families of the passengers have been left without any closure.
But hopes of answers didn't die with the search. Ten years on, some experts believe they might shed new light on aviation's biggest mystery and potentially reveal MH370's final resting place. Finding the main wreckage could help resolve not only the mystery but also answer the question of who was flying the plane when it disappeared.
One obstacle in finding MH370 has been determining where to look. Dr Usama Kadri, a mathematician at Cardiff University, explains that nobody knows exactly where MH370 is. Official investigations showed MH370 deviated from its planned route, instead heading southwest over the Indian Ocean. A measurement called burst-timing offset (BTO) helped experts estimate possible locations for the plane's final destination.
While airborne, aeroplanes transmit automatic signals, known as 'handshakes', to satellites, and BTO is a measurement of how long these signals take to travel between plane and satellite. Different BTO values can then be mapped out as a series of arcs on Earth's surface, with each arc representing a range of BTO values and hence possible distances.
The last recorded 'handshakes' from MH370 were sent from somewhere within its seventh arc. Experts, therefore, concluded that MH370 should be found somewhere off the western coast of Australia. However, the official targeted search area was huge, covering 120,000km2 - around half the size of the UK.
Sound Signatures
Narrowing the search window would boost the chances of success. Kadri believes that underwater microphones, known as hydrophones, could help provide clues as to where search teams should focus their efforts.
Hydrophones capture sound waves and pressure changes in the ocean. Violent ocean impacts, such as plane crashes, produce distinctive acoustic signatures. Hydrophones have detected signals from aircraft crashes as well as earthquakes thousands of miles away.
A 200-tonne aircraft crashing at 720km/h would release kinetic energy equivalent to a small earthquake. Hydrophones are very sensitive, making it highly unlikely that a crash of this magnitude wouldn't leave a detectable pressure signature.
The challenge is making sense of the data amidst the ocean's noise. "It's not a question of 'Is the sound being recorded?'" Kadri says. "The question is: 'Can we actually see that recording?'"
What matters as much as where MH370 crashed is how it crashed. Kadri's work shows that violent plane crashes into the ocean are easier to detect in the acoustic data. If MH370 had made a softer landing, it might not have generated a signal large enough to be seen in the background noise.
This research builds on work undertaken by scientists at Australia's Curtin University in the year MH370 disappeared.
Explosive Investigations
While hydrophones could be a promising approach for detecting missing planes, Kadri wasn't able to find a signal with the certainty needed to launch a new search for MH370. The mystery remains unsolved, but explosions might help.
On 15 November 2017, the Argentinian submarine ARA San Juan carrying a crew of 44 went missing during a routine exercise. Experts at CTBTO stations noticed an unusual signal recorded by hydrophones a few hours later that could indicate an implosion.
The navy dropped grenades from the air at the submarine's last-known location. The signal generated from these controlled explosions was similar to the unusual signal recorded a few hours after the submarine's disappearance. A year later, search teams discovered the wreckage of the San Juan just 20km from the anomaly identified in the CTBTO data.
Kadri's theory is that experts could conduct similar explosion experiments for MH370 along the seventh arc. "The basic idea is that we release the same amount of energy we believe has been released by MH370," he says.
If the signals show similar pressure amplitudes, it would support future searches in that location. Conversely, if the signals are found to be unrelated, it might indicate that authorities should reassess the official time frame or location of the search window.
However, explosions carry expenses, require specialized equipment, and have environmental costs. Before conducting these experiments, Kadri acknowledges that they would likely require approval from the Malaysian government.
Radio Tripwires
Kadri's not the only one with an interest in finding MH370. Simon Maskell, a professor of autonomous systems at the University of Liverpool, is looking at a different approach: radio tripwires.
Maskell and his team are analyzing data from a technology called WSPR, which involves amateur radio operators sending low-power test signals to receivers up to 10,000km away. These signals are stored in a huge database called WSPRnet.
"Think of WSPR like radio tripwires," Maskell says. By this, he means trying to determine if these tripwires fire more often when an airplane is present.
Maskell is carrying out this work in collaboration with Richard Godfrey, a retired aerospace engineer on a decade-long quest to locate MH370. Godfrey believes that MH370 would have generated anomalies in WSPR data after it went missing.
Godfrey has pinpointed 130 disturbances in WSPR signals occurring over the southern Indian Ocean and reckons they could be evidence of MH370's final flight path. The disturbances terminate at a point just outside of the seventh arc, raising the possibility that search teams didn't look far enough from the last point of communication between satellite and plane.
Godfrey believes that one final search would be enough to find the missing aircraft and solve the world's biggest aviation mystery. However, Maskell is using statistical tools to determine if there's any weight to Godfrey's hypothesis.
In other efforts, researchers are putting their hopes in marine crustaceans. Although we haven't found MH370's main wreckage yet, a large piece of debris that washed up on a beach in Saint-Denis on Reunion Island in 2015 confirmed that it belonged to MH370. The challenge now lies in finding the remaining wreckage.
The deep, dark, cold conditions of the ocean have given rise to a new group of detective heroes: barnacles. By studying the geochemistry of their shells, scientists believe they might be able to determine where the plane crashed. Even if it takes a few years, the world will find MH370. It's just a matter of when.
- Researchers are investigating the use of hydrophones, underwater microphones that capture sound waves and pressure changes in the ocean, to detect the possible location of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
- Aviation's biggest mystery, the disappearance of MH370 in 2014, might be resolved through new technology and methods, such as underwater microphones and radio tripwires.
- The challenge in using hydrophones is making sense of the data amidst the ocean's noise, as it's not a question of whether the sound is being recorded, but rather if it can be seen in the recorded data.
- Professor Simon Maskell of the University of Liverpool is using radio tripwires, a technology involving amateur radio operators sending low-power test signals, in an attempt to find MH370's final flight path.
- Academics believe that studying the geochemistry of marine crustaceans, particularly their shells, could help scientists determine the location of the main wreckage of MH370.
- Other experts are working on solutions for energy production and reducing the environmental impact of technology, which could aid in the search and recovery of missing aircraft like MH370.
- The future of aviation and general news will likely involve advancements in robotics, chemistry, space-and-astronomy, technology, and the environment to help solve mysteries and improve transportation safety.
- The disappearance and subsequent search for MH370 have sparked interest and innovation in various fields, contributing to the advancement of science, technology, and the pursuit of answers to complex questions about our world and beyond.
