Flight MH370: Search should shift to Kyrgyzstan where smoke cloud was seen according to scientist
03 June 2014 02:42 PM By Don-Mackay
Professor Duncan Steel says search teams should look in the Besh-Tash valley after smoke was seen at the time the plane could have crashed
A space scientist says the hunt for missing Flight MH370 should be switched thousands of miles onto land and into a northern valley of Kyrgyzstan, where a cloud of smoke was seen at about the time the plane could have crashed.
Astrobiology professor Duncan Steel says there is an outside chance the Boeing 777 which vanished in March could have crashed into the Besh-Tash valley in the Central Asian country.
New Zealand physicist Prof Steel says the search for the plane in the Indian Ocean appeared to be in the wrong place.
Although he personally feels the Kuala Lumpar to Beijing flight with 239 passengers and crew on board crashed into the sea in a northern corridor,- he also says the possible land crash site should be explored.
Someone should go and take a look at the suggested crash site in the valley, which was indicated by a smoke plume just when the aircraft would have between expected to have crashed," he said. "In reality, that might only be a one-in-a-1000 possibility, but why not go and take a look so as to exclude it?
His conclusions match those of the joint search team based in Perth, Western Australia, that the sonic pings in the Indian Ocean were not from the MH370s emergency locater beacon.
He said it was more likely the aircraft headed south at near 5,000 knots until it ran out of fuel and ended up much further south than the current search area.
He said they were still to be given vital information from the Burst Frequency Offsets - when a plane fails to shake hands with ground-based beacons as it flies overhead.
If we had that information, we could check on what was done to verify it or possibly find errors.
Meanwhile, former Malaysian Airlines chief pilot, Captain Nik Ahmad Huzlan Nik Hussain said he had no reason to disbelieve the analysis and calculations by Britains Inmarset and the Air Accidents Investigation Branch.
He said the calculations had been verified by experts familiar with the fields of satellite communications from a technical angle.
But, however, there are "margins of error caused by utilisation of assumptions" which may result in the widening of the search area.
