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MH370: Aviation's most bizarre loss

Fruitless search: RAAF aircrew drop marker buoys into the Indian Ocean off WA. Picture: Michael Wilson/The West Australian

Without doubt, the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 with 239 passengers and crew aboard on March 8 last year is the most bizarre in the history of aviation.

As the anniversary of its disappearance approaches, not one piece of debris has been found despite the most comprehensive search ever undertaken.

The initial search focused on its flight track from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing over the South China Sea.

It then moved west as evidence mounted that the plane had turned towards the Malaysian Peninsula after various tracking systems were turned off.

Within a week it was formally revealed that the plane had flown on for seven hours, based on satellite tracking and had turned south into the southern Indian Ocean.

British satellite company Inmarsat continued to receive responses from the plane to hourly status requests.

The final status request and plane acknowledgments occurred at 8.10am and then the Boeing 777 sent a log-on request at 8.19am.

Those signals were picked up from an Inmarsat satellite 38,000km above the Indian Ocean and were relayed via a ground station in Perth.

On March 16 the search was moved to the southern Indian Ocean with the first aerial searches conducted from Perth on March 18 - 10 days after MH370 disappeared.

Oceanographers agreed that any chance of spotting a major debris field was lost.

Complicating the search, apparent pings were detected several times from the plane's black boxes, but these turned out to be a false lead.

The initial air search in the southern Indian Ocean, which lasted 42 days, covered 4.5 million sqkm of ocean.

In all, 334 search flights were conducted at an average eight a day with a total of 3000 air hours.

Supporting Australia in the air search were New Zealand, China, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and the US.

After the early efforts came up blank, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, charged with leading the search, convened a think tank of the best minds in the business to reassess the disappearance.

Five independent groups were formed and all came up with the same search area.

Explaining why the search was shifted much further south, the ATSB issued a comprehensive 64-page report detailing its analysis.

In December, a senior Boeing 777 captain, Simon Hardy, said he had calculated exactly where MH370 had crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.

The position he gave was extremely close to the current search area.

According to respected airline safety editor David Learmount, of FlightGlobal, the location given by Capt. Hardy "was not fundamentally at odds with the present MH370 search assumptions".

Capt. Hardy's calculations are based on a combination of data that includes the In- marsat satellite communication "handshake arcs", his expertise in 777 performance calculation and some mathematical "reverse engineering" of the navigation geometry known to apply to this flight.

'Five independent groups were formed and all came up with the same search area.' " Aviation editor *Geoffrey Thomas *