MARCH 12 — The MH370 incident is now two years behind us, and although the Malaysian government has in January 2015 concluded that everyone on board the plane had died, many next-of-kin of passengers or air crew continue to believe in other possibilities.
The final resting place of the doomed aircraft remains very much a mystery to this day, and March 8 will always sum up painful memories for victims' families as they hope they will get to know the answers they have always wanted to know some day.
No doubt the search operation and investigations on MH370 have been unparalleled in scale. The SAR team has been doing its job based on the presumption that MH370 went down the Indian Ocean unmanned. Upon such a presumption, the SAR team has locked in its operation scope to almost 120,000 sq km of seas of Southern Indian Ocean to the west of Australia.
However, nothing has been found from 2014 until today, and the SAR team hopes to conclude the search on remaining sections of the seas by this July,and may have to consider other suppositions if this does not yield any result by then — including the hypothesis that the plane was being piloted before it went down — which will increase the search area by at least three times, entailing immense cost.
So far the only more substantial evidence has been a flaperon discovered in La Reunion on July 29 last year and another piece believed to be from an aircraft that was found on the same island on March 3 this year. However, it is yet to be confirmed that the debris indeed belongs to MH370.
The SAR operation aside, the investigation team is still studying issues in eight areas, including the plane's deviation from its original flight path, operation of air traffic services, messages from the air crew, the navigability of the plane's electronic systems, aircraft maintenance and the state of satellite communication, among others.
The international investigation team released the second annual interim report on MH370 on March 8. The report asserts that once the location of the aircraft's debris has been ascertained, or the search operation has come to a conclusion, a final report will be tabled.
Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau responsible for the SAR operation, has said the 120,000 sq km search area will be completely combed later this year, which has been echoed by PM Najib. If MH370 is still not found by then, Malaysia will discuss follow-up plans with Australia and China. We have no idea what the follow-up plans are, but we have to admit this is the eventual outcome as all investigations and searches will have to come to a close one day.
Despite the many mysteries and all kinds of deductions made, the search personnel are still ploughing on with their duty undeterred by the vast expanse of unknowns before them and lofty expectations from the people. They believe some day the truth will surface and the aircraft will be found. — Sin Chew Daily
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail Online.
