[Peetwo]

Update 16/05/18: OI not giving up yet?

Via the Oz:

Door still open for MH370 searchers
EAN HIGGINS

The company searching for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is ‘not closing the door’ on a new hunt.

---

MH370 searchers ‘not closing door’ on mystery

The company searching for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is “not closing the door” on a new hunt, possibly in the area identified by senior airline pilots as likely to contain the aircraft but ignored by Australian officials.

Ocean Infinity, the British-owned undersea survey company based in Houston, is reaching the end of its “no find, no fee” search for MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean.

In a deal with the Malaysian government, Ocean Infinity has 90 days of actual searching to find the Boeing 777, and will receive a fee of up to $US70 million ($93m) only if the wreckage is found.

Ocean Infinity spokesman Mark Antelme said: “We’re coming to the end of the search in the next week or two.”

Mr Antelme said the search vessel leased by Ocean Infinity, the Seabed Constructor, had almost completed the 90 days. Its crew expected to have searched all target areas and needed to move on as difficult winter sea conditions closed in, he said.

“We’re not closing the door on future MH370 searches, but will not go straight into anything,” Mr Antelme said.

“When we have done the 90 days we return to other projects.”

MH370 vanished on a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 passengers and crew on board. About 40 minutes into the flight, radio contact ceased, the aircraft’s radar transponder was turned off, and military radar and automatic satellite tracking data later revealed the plane had turned back over Malaysia before a long track to the southern Indian Ocean.

At the request of Malaysia. the Australian Transport Safety Bureau led a failed underwater search of 120,000 sq km, the target zone determined by its theory that the pilots were incapacitated at the end of the flight and the aircraft flew on auto­pilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed in a steep spiral.

Senior airline pilots, including Australian Byron Bailey and Briton Simon Hardy, maintain this theory is wrong and that evidence shows MH370’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, hijacked his own aircraft, killed everyone else on board by depressurising it while he remained on the pilot’s long oxygen supply, and flew it to the end before ditching it.

Because a pilot could have flown the aircraft farther than if on autopilot, including by gliding it after the fuel ran out, Captains Bailey and Hardy and some other airline pilots believe MH370 lies not far beyond the southern boundary of where the ATSB searched originally.

“Four of us came up independently with a ditching location 60 to 100 nautical miles south of latitude 38 degrees south, and if searched in that location MH370 has a high probability of being found,” Captain Bailey told The Australian. “It’s ridiculous that Ocean Infinity are now searching over 1000km north of 38 South at the behest of the ATSB,” he said, referring to the fact the new search plan was based on where the ATSB predicted would be the next best place to look.

Mr Antelme said Ocean Infinity was agnostic about whether the ATSB’s “ghost flight- death dive” theory or the rival controlled ditching scenario was the right one, saying it had based its search plan primarily on drift modelling done by the CSIRO and, separately, by the University of Western Australia.

The two studies both indicated a position farther north than the first search target zone.

MTF...P2