Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared without a trace over a decade ago. Malaysia’s government announced last week that it will resume its search efforts for the missing airliner. Maritime robotics company Ocean Infinity signed an 18-month deal to lead the effort and will receive $70 million if they can find the aircraft. The search will utilize low-power transmissions to trace potential flight paths MH370 could have taken in 2014.
Ocean Infinity will be using emerging technology reliant on Weak Signal Propagation Reporter or WSPR, pronounced whisper. The methodology uses low-power transmissions, ubiquitous with ham radio, to parse out a flight path like following breadcrumbs. Imagine radio waves radiating out over the ocean like beams of light between their origins and destinations. If a large plane crosses a beam, it creates a disturbance that can be recorded. With enough WSPR data from the day MH370 disappeared, investigators could estimate an approximate flight path. Simon Maskell, an autonomous systems professor, is advising Infinity Ocean and spoke with the Telegraph:
“The important question is whether all of this analysis usefully reduces the search area. As soon as you can definitely say the plane couldn’t have headed north or it couldn’t have gone this far south you have narrowed things down and that is useful.”
MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on March 8, 2014. The flight was scheduled to fly to Beijing, China. However, air traffic control lost contact with the flight’s Boeing 777 when it entered Vietnamese airspace over the Gulf of Thailand. Military radar tracked the plane as it mysteriously made a U-turn and headed out over the Indian Ocean. Contact was lost completely an hour later. The initial search was called off in 2017. There were 227 passengers and 12 crew members onboard.
WSPR disturbances aren’t going to vividly plot a path across a map to a precise location. The goal is to cordon off a manageable search area. Debris from MH370 has washed ashore on Africa’s east coast, over 4,000 miles away from Malaysia. Infinity Ocean has drawn off a 5,800 square-mile area, roughly the size of Connecticut.
Even with a narrowed area of interest, finding the plane will be incredibly difficult. It is possible that the Boeing 777’s fuselage has completely submerged in the soft muddy seabed of the South Indian Ocean over the past ten years.