MH370 - Failed phone call, seventh handshake help refine MH370 search area

The Malaysian Insider

New evidence about a failed call to MH370 made on a satellite telephone ‎by Malaysia Airlines has helped refine the location where the jetliner may have gone down, The Economist reported.

This, and ongoing analysis of satellite “handshakes” from the plane, have helped to refine the search area in the vast southern Indian Ocean.

Though the plane made no satellite communications, automatic connections at regular intervals have revealed data which are being examined further. Combing through the data can eliminate “small frequency variations” that could help plot a more accurate flight path of the plane in its final hours.

The seventh handshake might be crucial to determining where the plane went down. The Economist reported that this handshake was said to have come after seven hours and 38 minutes of flight, and was in response to an interruption in the plane’s power supply.

With the plane running out of fuel after flying for so long, the engines would have failed and the Boeng 777’s “ram air turbine” would have kicked in.

This turbine is a “windmill-like device that extends from the side of the fuselage into the slipstream”, The Economist said.

“Turned by the passing air, it can generate limited electrical and hydraulic power.”

This would have triggered the auxiliary power unit (APU), a small engine at the rear of the plane.

“It is believed that starting the APU brought the aircraft’s systems back to life and initiated the seventh handshake with the satellite”. This seventh handshake would have been sent after the APU had powered up, the article said.

If the pilots were already incapacitated at this point, the plane’s autopilot would not have been engaged and this might have caused the aircraft to “enter a spiral descent towards the ocean”.

Investigators are still unsure, however, and the report said that more can only be known after the plane’s flight recorders are recovered. It added that three ships have been contracted for a year to conduct the new search.

MH370 was bound for Beijing with 239 onboard when it went missing on March 8 and no trace of the flight has been found since, despite an extensive search in the Indian Ocean.

The narrowed search area is now 60,000 square kilometres, 10 times smaller than the original field, the Economist reported. “Contour mapping” technology is being used to plot the sea bed, along with ships pulling sonar devices called “towfish” in attempts to detect objects at the bottom of the sea.

A spokeswoman for the Australian Joint Agency Coordination Centre, which is managing the search for MH370, was reported by the magazine as saying that there is “cautious optimism” that something can be found.

Still, the search remains a colossal undertaking, the report said. “It is not just grieving relatives who want answers, but airlines too", it concluded. – September 6, 2014.

Source: https://my.news.yahoo.com