SYDNEY // The latest analysis of the final moments of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 suggests no one was controlling the plane when it plunged into the ocean, an investigators report said on Wednesday.
Experts hunting for the aircraft, which crashed into the Indian Ocean off Western Australia in 2014, have gathered in the Australian capital, Canberra, to review the search.
A report by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is leading the search, supports the theory that no one was at the controls when the Boeing 777 ran out of fuel and dropped.
In recent months, experts have been suggesting that someone was in control when the plane crashed, meaning it could have glided much farther. That would triple the size of the area where it could have crashed and further complicate the hugely complex effort to find it.
But Wednesday’s report shows the latest analysis of satellite data is consistent with the plane being in a “high and increasing rate of descent” in its final moments.
The report also said that an analysis of a wing flap that washed ashore in Tanzania indicated it was probably not deployed when it broke off. A pilot would extend the flaps during a crash landing.
Peter Foley, the bureau’s director of Flight 370 search operations, has said that if the flap was not deployed it would almost certainly rule out the theory that the plane entered the water in a controlled ditch.
That would mean searchers were looking in the right place, Mr Foley said.
“It means the aircraft wasn’t configured for a landing or a ditching,” he said on Wednesday. “You can draw your own conclusions as to whether that means someone was in control.
“You can never be 100 per cent. We are very reluctant to express absolute certainty.”
The report’s release came as a team of international and Australian searchers begin a three-day summit to re-examine all of the data on the plane, which was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8 with 239 people on board.
More than 20 items of debris, suspected or confirmed to be from the plane, have washed ashore on coastlines throughout the Indian Ocean but a deep-sea sonar search for the main wreckage has found nothing.
A complete sweep of the 120,000-square kilometre zone is expected to be finished by the new year, and officials have said there are no plans to extend the hunt unless evidence emerges that pinpoints a location.
Australian transport minister Darren Chester said experts at this week’s summit would be working on guidance for any future search.
Experts have been trying to define a new search area by studying the point from which the first piece of wreckage recovered – a wing flap known as a flaperon – most probably drifted.
Several replica flaperons were floated to see whether it is the wind or the currents that primarily affect how they drift. The results of that experiment are part of a new analysis.
The preliminary results of that analysis, published in Wednesday’s report, suggest the debris may have originated in the current search area, or to its north.
The transport bureau said the analysis was continuing and the results would probably be refined.
* Associated Press
