Missing MH370 flight may have nosedived into the ocean: Researchers
The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been an enduring mystery since the plane lost contact with air traffic control on March 8, 2014, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Now a team of researchers at Texas A&M University at Qatar believe they have solved an important puzzle, simulating the plane’s most likely crash scenario.
The team, led by Texas A&M mathematician Goong Chen, concluded that a nosedive crash into the ocean at a 90-degree angle would explain the lack of any sign of debris or oil around the suspected crash site.
“The true final moments of MH370 are likely to remain a mystery until someday when its black box is finally recovered and decoded,” Chen says.
“But forensics strongly supports that MH370 plunged into the ocean in a nosedive.”
In a paper for the American Mathematical Society, the team detailed their theory of what happened to the flight that vanished, carrying 239 people.
They say a crash of this type, with the plane entering the water like a diver, would create the least resistance and mean the aircraft would not break up into small pieces on the ocean surface.
Rather, large parts of the aircraft would have remained intact and sunk to the sea floor, leaving little evidence behind.
They ran computer simulations on a supercomputer to test five different crash scenarios and found that this was the most likely reason no debris was found even after extensive searches.
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