By Tim Binnall
The latest twist in the mystery of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 comes by way of an aeronautical engineer in England who is confident that he has determined where the airliner ultimately crashed. Richard Godfrey told the BBC that his process involved studying various data sets from the curious case which, until now, had not been coalesced into one overarching proverbial 'picture' of the now-infamous 2014 event which saw a 777 Boeing passenger plane and its 239 occupants suddenly vanish without a trace. "No one had the idea before," he explained, "to combine Inmarsat satellite data, with Boeing performance data, with Oceanographic floating debris drift data, with WSPR net data."
Following a year of studying that wealth of information, Godfrey and his team of researchers believe that they have managed to pinpoint the crash site down to a fairly specific location, measuring around 40 nautical miles in diameter, in the Indian Ocean approximately 1,250 miles from Perth, Australia. Of course, putting forward a potential spot for where the airliner went down may wind up being the easiest part of solving the mystery, since the area needs to be searched in order to confirm their findings. To that end, Godfrey cautioned that "the wreckage could be behind a cliff or in a canyon on the ocean floor" two-and-a-half miles deep underwater.
With multiple searches from both private groups and different governments having been conducted over the years with no resolution to the mystery and at a considerable cost, it remains to be seen whether or not anyone will take up the challenge of testing Godfrey's hypothesis. However, he is hopeful that someone will make the effort and postulated that, since over a 100 Chinese nationals were aboard MH370 when it disappeared, perhaps China might try to find the airliner or, failing that, he mused that "private companies might search, sponsored by insurance companies." Following a lengthy search which concluded in 2017, the Australian government indicated that they are "not involved in any contemporary efforts to establish the location of the aircraft."
Should some group or nation decide to launch a new search for MH370 based on Godfrey's work, it will likely still be quite some time before the matter is resolved one way or the other. That's because experts say that the best time, seasonally, to look in that area of the ocean is actually now and, since the information has just come to light, it will undoubtedly take another year for the necessary funds and equipment to be put together to conduct a new search under the ideal conditions. So while Godfrey's research is undeniably tantalizing and holds some promise, the MH370 mystery appears destined to remain unsolved at least for the time being.