Investigators seeking the missing Malaysia Airlines plane face a “colossal task” that is “far, far harder” than the two-year search for an Air France plane that crashed into the Atlantic, the man who led the French inquiry has warned.
Alain Bouillard’s comments came as experts described the hazardous stretch of deep waters that may contain debris belonging to flight MH370 as “one of the most hostile environments in the world”.
Mr Bouillard was in charge of the hunt for AF447 that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009 between Rio de Janeiro and Paris with 228 people on board. It only took six days for French and Brazilian naval forces to find the first bodies and the Airbus A330 tailpiece. But that was only the beginning of a long search to recover the main wreck and above all the flight recorders.
Mr Bouillard, 63, worked for France’s air accident investigation bureau, or BEA, a world authority on probing air crashes and also led the investigation into the Concorde crash outside Paris in 2000.
Three BEA members are helping the Malaysian authorities in their search for flight MH370 that disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing plane on March 8 with 239 people on board.
Four planes were trying to check whether two objects seen on satellite images were debris from the Boeing 777 in an area 1,550 miles south-west of Perth.
“This disappearance is still a great mystery, and will lead to an inquiry and a search that is far, far harder that what we had looking for Air France 447,”Mr Bouillard told The Telegraph.
“Firstly we had many more clues. We knew that the Air France plane had a problem, thanks to 24 ACAR messages sent over four minutes; we knew its precise location four minutes before impact, which allowed us to reduce our search zone to only 40 nautical miles,” he said. “That is nothing compared to the surface area of today’s search.”
He said he would remain very “prudent” over sightings of debris. “We were initially put off by satellite images of a fuel slick that turned out to be a false lead. Planes found debris that had nothing to do with the crash including of another plane on a beach,” he said.
If these indeed prove to be from flight MH370, he said experts would have to immediately start studying the currents in this zone to work out the “reverse drift” - a theoretical estimate of the initial position of bodies and debris by studying currents and winds in the crash area.
“Objects that have drifted for two weeks will have travelled a long way in that time. If you have currents at four knots, that mean four nautical miles per day and a considerable distance in 14 days,” he said.
Adding to the challenge, the images of the debris were taken eight days after the plane was spotted, meaning the debris itself would have floated much further east since the images were captured.
“After you have identified and examined some debris, you can piece together how the plane broke up. Was it in the air, was it during a sea landing, or did it hit the ocean surface? From that you can build up a scenario,” he said.
If the latest wreckage sightings turn out to be correct, the search will have to overcome a series of almost unimaginable challenges, not least waters so deep that only a handful of vessels would be capable of scouring the seabed for the plane’s black box.
“It [the possible debris] is in the middle of nowhere in one of the most hostile environments in the world,” said Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi, an expert on the Indian Ocean from the University of Western Australia.
Mr Bouillard said, however, that reaching the wreck was not the hardest task facing search teams. “We found the AF 447 at around 12,000 feet. The Phoenix Towed Pinger Locator (which can detect emergency black box beacons) can go down to around 6,000 metres. The first question is: where was the point of impact? We can only send out serious means once we have defined a much smaller search area.”
The search for Air France’s main wreck and black boxes long proved fruitless, despite gathering all the world’s vessels capable of finding them. These included underwater drones whose sonar can sweep large surface areas of the seabed to find objects; a deep towed sonar; two remotely operated vehicles and three autonomous underwater vehicles.
In the end they did away with complex equations predicting the wreck’s likely location and simply scoured the zone systematically. After detecting a large object on the sea floor, they sent down remote vehicles equipped with high definition cameras. Mr Bouillard was in the ship watching in real time when the black boxes were found. “It was a euphoric moment.”
He added: “Naturally we saw many mummified bodies, some lying down others still in their seats, all of which were brought back to the surface in a special container.”
“They still had the form of bodies but after two years were surrounded by a kind of white cocoon of micro-organisms and we had no idea what state they were in inside.”
Mr Bouillard said: “In this search, the means today are American - the drones, the remotely operated vehicles. But we can bring our experience in the methodology – all the experience we gained.”
Malaysian authorities said they had been speaking to French BEA experts on how they dealt with the “raw emotions” of passengers’ families. “The difficulty at first is to above all validate real information and not spread information that turns out to be false leads, it’s terrible for the families,” said Mr Bouillard. “Above all, we found it difficult to deal with the’ incomprehension that we weren’t able to find the plane, even within a 40 nautical mile zone.”
As for the current probe, he said: “There are three main questions you must ask in an inquiry. First, what happened, how did it happen and why did it happen? Today, we still have still made no progress on what happened.”
"It will be highly complex, collosal task and a result is anything but guaranteed."
Friday 21 March 2014
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/malaysia/10712857/Malaysia-Airlines-MH370-Air-France-investigator-warns-of-colossal-task.html
