That, it’s reckoned, would have caused it to disintegate into thousands of pieces.
The National Post was quoting Harro Ranter, Founder and Director of Aviation Safety Network, in the Netherlands.
Ranter however thinks that the main wreckage site was still out there somewhere. Larger pieces of the plane, like the engines, would have typically sunk at the location of impact.
“No matter what type of accident, it’s very likely that there will still be remains of wreckage at the accident location,” he added.
MH370, even by missing aircraft standards, remains a mystery.
MH370-related debris found so far, at least nine, have only deepened the mystery. At the same time, the debris find apparently confirms the southern Indian Ocean is the right place to hunt for the missing plane. The 7th Arc, the search zone, is southeast of Australia.
“There are not many similar cases like MH370, in which the wreckage was found so far away from the likely location of the accident,” concedes Ranter.
It appears that our original predictions may have been on the money, wrote Australia’s national science agency in an August 2015 blog post. “The finding of a flaperon on La Réunion does match up with the calculations that place the crash site in the present area being searched by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB).”
No one conceived of the possibility that an airliner could go missing the way MH370 did, continued Ranter. “There were similar aircrafts missing, but in most cases, it was fairly certain in what area the accident occurred.”
ASN has compiled data which shows that 84 aircraft vanished without a trace – no debris or human remains, nothing – since 1948. Still, MH370 remains one of the few deadly incidents and an enduring mystery.
Air France Flight 447, the closest to MH370, went down in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, carrying 228 passengers. The aircraft’s wreckage was finally found two years later. There were some human remains still intact.
“We cannot speculate as to whether this will be the case with MH370, but we have a recovery plan which caters for a variety of scenarios,” wrote an ATSB spokesperson in an email to the National Post. “If MH370 is discovered, the first priority will be the recovery of the Flight Data Recorders (the ‘Black Boxes’), which will help us to understand what caused the aircraft’s disappearance.”
Martin Dolan, who heads ATSB, believes there are still “good prospects” of finding the plane, but concedes that the likelihood was diminishing by the day.
“The best advice we have had from all experts was that it was highly probable, but not certain, the aircraft would be found (within the search zone),” he told the Guardian. “We have to contemplate the possibility, now, that we will not find the aircraft.”
Already, Malaysia, China and Australia have agreed not to continue the search for MH370 beyond the extended July/August deadline unless new evidence emerges on where the ill-fated plane exactly lies.
Two independent studies have suggested that MH370 went down in the northern Indian Ocean. India has ruled out the Bay of Bengal. Some residents in the Maldives, south of Sri Lanka, claim to have seen a large aircraft in the colours of Malaysia Airlines on 8 March 2014 in the area. The aircraft was reportedly in flames and believed to have gone down in the area where it was seen.
MH370 disappeared on 8 March 2014, on a routine Kuala Lumpur to Beijing flight, with 239 passengers and crew on board.
Some 15, 000 sq km of the 120,000 sq km of the designated search zone remains to be covered. The search zone covers an area equivalent to North Korea.