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GWEN IFILL: Now: the continuing search for a missing jetliner that captured the attention of the world.
Jeffrey Brown has more.
JEFFREY BROWN: The break gave investigators time to create a kind of map of the understood water seabed, and the search resumed on Monday. Three ships will be involved in this next phase, which could last as long as a year.
Last spring, ships and planes from 14 countries served vast areas of the South China Sea and other regions.
Tonight’s “NOVA” focuses on the continuing investigation and many questions that remain and the technology of tracking planes.
Our science correspondent, Miles O’Brien, is the producer and reporter for the report titled “Why Planes Vanish” and he joins me from Boston.
So, Miles, as the search restarts, where do things stand? What exactly are they focused on now?
MILES O’BRIEN: Well, they’re focused on a very big area.
And, Jeff, it’s hard not to say that we’re sort of still at square one on this one. And that’s an amazing thing to say so many months after the loss of MH370. The search zone has been defined by some ingenious mathematics. Essentially, engineers in this company Inmarsat, which operates communications satellites, which was part of what was equipped on MH370, were able to turn a communications capability into a positioning tool and were able to define this location in the Southern Indian Ocean as a search zone for the flight, which flew on seven hours after it disappeared from radar screens.
But we know it’s in that hemisphere by virtue of this mathematics, but it’s in a very, very big region, a big swathe. They can’t define a bullseye. So we have got to be ready for a long search here.
JEFFREY BROWN: So the mystery of where it is, but still the mystery of what happened. And I know your documentary is looking at various possibilities of what might have happened, from accident to human intervention.
How much — where — is the evidence pointing in any particular way at this point?
MILES O’BRIEN: Well, first of all, let’s just say I wouldn’t take anything off the table yet.
All the scenarios that you have heard and discussed are still in play, as far as I’m concerned. It’s very difficult, however, to walk away from a scenario that doesn’t involve some sort of deliberate action, a human hand being involved in some way.
After it fell off the radar screens, it made a 180-degree turn back toward the Malaysian Peninsula. The plane then took a right turn, and threaded the needle between airspace between Indonesia and Malaysia, and then flew up off the radar screens, literally, off of primary radar screens, at the northern tip of Indonesia, in Banda Aceh.
That route doesn’t bespeak a plane that is crippled and the crew is unable to communicate, or a ghost plane, if you will. That tells me somebody was manipulating controls. But what was happening beyond that is difficult to say.
JEFFREY BROWN: So, bringing this story forward, you’re — you’re looking at what can be done to better track planes now and in the future.
We have a clip from the film on — it’s on the technology called NextGen. Let’s look at that.
MILES O’BRIEN: Here, they’re using a technology called Automatic Dependence Surveillance Broadcast, or ADSB.
It is the keystone component of NextGen. An aircraft outfitted with this system determines location using GPS and transmits that data back to controllers very radio, which has a greater range than radar. But, still, when an aircraft flies over the ocean, it will be out of range.
So the industry is testing a space-based system where planes would report to locations via satellite wherever they are in the world. There are numerous technical details that need to be worked out, but ADSB could eventually make blind spots a thing of the past.
MAN: We have currently one aircraft under ADSB coverage at the moment. This is a United flight from Chicago going to Beijing.
MILES O’BRIEN: The aircraft depicted in white is using ADSB to broadcast its exact GPS location automatically once a second.
MAN: We see the aircraft. We know it’s there. We know exactly where the aircraft is at all times.
JEFFREY BROWN: You refer there to technical details to be worked out. I know another barrier to something like that has been cost. How near or far are we from a technology like that to track planes in the future?
MILES O’BRIEN: Well, it’s a problem. It’s taken a long time. The FAA rollout of next generation technology has been slow and has been criticized for being poorly funded and not implemented well.
It needs to happen. I mean, Jeff, we’re — it’s the 21st century, and we’re relying on 1940s technology to track airplanes, radar, which has a range of 200 miles, and that’s it. Only 2 percent of the surface of the Earth is covered by radar.
So we have satellites that can do this. The technology is off the shelf. It’s just a matter of forcing the regulators to move quickly, funding it properly, and insisting that the airlines equip their airplanes with this. And it’s difficult. The airline business is a tough business. And the airlines don’t want to put this investment into this sort of technology unless they have to, frankly.
JEFFREY BROWN: So, you know, there are so many pieces to this story. And I wonder, as you went back to look at it all, what jumped out at you as most interesting or surprising or is still sticking with you?
MILES O’BRIEN: Well, it’s astonishing to me, number one, that an airliner could vanish in this day and age. It’s astonishing.
JEFFREY BROWN: That’s — even just that, that gripped everybody for so long, that has — that’s never gone away, right?
MILES O’BRIEN: Yes. And I can’t — I can’t get out of my head, Jeff, that after all these months, seven months, we haven’t seen a seat cushion, a flight magazine or a shoe that has been floating in the ocean as some evidence that there is, in fact, wreckage out there.
You know, when Air France 447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, they ultimately picked up 3,000 pieces of floating debris in the ocean. So when planes go into the ocean, it’s not like they just go in cleanly and disappear that way. There would be something floating.
So where is it? And I’m mystified at that. And I remain — I walked in thinking I was going to have an answer to where this plane is, and I walked away still wondering.
JEFFREY BROWN: Do you think it will be solved eventually?
MILES O’BRIEN: I don’t think they will stop looking. They can’t. It’s a huge, huge region.
We’re going to have to be very patient. Here’s my worry, though. When they find the black boxes, and they will one day, when they find those black boxes, it may not answer the mystery. If it shows it was a perfectly good operating aircraft that ran out of fuel, and you have a cockpit voice recorder that is silent, what has that told you? You don’t know who did it or why.
JEFFREY BROWN: All right, “Why Planes Vanish” is on “NOVA.”
Miles O’Brien, thank you so much.
MILES O’BRIEN: You’re welcome, Jeff.
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