Pilot Spots New Debris, Search for MH370 Continues on the Same Sites

25th Sep 2015

On 15^th September, an Air France pilot, flying some 10,000 miles over the water, spotted a ‘white object’ floating to the northwest of the Reunion Island. Believing this could be debris from the still missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, the pilot notified the authorities.

Search Teams Sent to Check Old Sites Once Again

However, instead of looking there, the Australian News.com.au reports that two search ships – Furgo Equator and Furgo Discovery – were sent to once more check the so-called ‘Seventh Arc, an area roughly 2,300 miles off Reunion Isle, where the search for the plane went for most of the last year, without any success.

This time, however, the two vessels will be equipped with a ‘higher frequency sonar’. This will allow their crews to conduct a more thorough search at all the 30 spots they previously looked at, but this time they can look deeper for any trace of the Boeing 777-200.

The authorities did, however, send a merchant ship that was nearby to check if it could find anything, but it didn’t.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was taking 239 passengers and crew members to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur on 8^th March, 2014, when it disappeared from the radar and cut off all other communication with the ground control. The plane apparently took a sharp turn to the west and, as it is speculated, crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

The search for the vanished aircraft proved to be pretty much fruitless until a resident of the French-owned Reunion Island found a piece of an airplane, called a flaperon on 29^th July this year. After the flaperon was sent to France for analysis, it was finally revealed that it was indeed from the MH370. This was the first real, physical piece of evidence and a clue as to where the plane could possibly be.