BY Nathan Salant
International search teams trying to figure out what happened to missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 plan to check out a report from an Australian tech company that claims to have detected what could be a commercial airliner on the Indian Ocean floor near Bangladesh.
The survey company, GeoResonance of Adelaide, said it found the anomaly and notified authorities on March 31, more than three weeks after the jetliner vanished from radar screens while on a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.“The company is not declaring this is MH370, however it should be investigated,” GeoResonance said Tuesday in a news release, according to Cable News Network (CNN).
No trace of the plane or its 239 passengers and crew have been found, despite a massive international search in the southern Indian Ocean — thousands of miles from the possible siting beneath the Bay of Bengal.
Experts conceded this week that search teams really had no choice but to check out the GeoResonance report, given that more-traditional methods used to find the plane had turned up nothing.
“The investigators are going to be hard-pressed to blow this off,” Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general for the US Department of Transportation, told CNN.
“They have to go look,” she said.
And look they will, CNN said.
Bangladesh dispatched two Navy frigates Wednesday to the location provided by GeoResonance, CNN said.
“As soon as they get there, they will search and verify the information,” said Commodore Rashed Ali, director of Bangladesh navy intelligence in Dhaka.
But officials involved in the traditional search that has gone six weeks without turning up a clue were skeptical of GeoResonance’s claims and said it was unlikely that anything from the missing plane would be found.
Australia’s retired Chief Air Marshal Angus Houston, who heads the Joint Agency Coordination Centre set up to investigate the plane’s disappearance, said the search area in the southern Indian Ocean was determined from signals believed sent from the aircraft’s flight data recorders.
“The advice from the experts is that’s probably where the aircraft lost power and, somewhere close to that, it probably entered the water,” Houston said.
But GeoResonance has said that its undisclosed technology discovered evidenced of aluminum, titanium, copper and other elements that could have been part of the missingBoeing 777 jetliner, CNN said.
Nathan Salant is based in San Francisco, California, United States of America, and is an Anchor for Allvoices. – via Google
