The expert, Prof Dr Mohd Harridon Mohamed Suffian, said he based his suggestion on a theory that the aircraft, which has been missing for two years, could have glided for between 1,000km and 2,000km beyond its last traced location just outside the search area.
He said independent experts who produced drift analyses of debris found in Madagascar and Africa believe that the missing Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 is not in the current search area.
“If the glide down theory is correct, the plane may be found mostly intact and the fuselage should also be at the site,” he told NST Online. He said the debris found so far indicated that bits of the plane had come off.
However the glide-down theory had to be fully explored. The current theory that the plane dived into the ocean after exhausting its fuel, was based on communications between the aircraft and an Inmarsat navigation satellite.
Fugro, the company contracted for the search operation has said that the plane might have been been slightly north of the current search area.
Harridon, who is head of research and innovation of Universiti Kuala Lumpur, was a candidate for the national astronaut programme.
He did not discount other possibilities for the plane’s final moments. “Everything is guesswork until the transponder or the plane is found,” he said.
Professor Azizan Abu Samah of the University of Malaya’s Institute of Ocean and Earth Sciences also agreed that all theories were speculative. “The ocean is so vast, making it hard to detect wreckage,” he said. The vast regions of the southern Indian Ocean had not been mapped, and with depths of more than 7km, the main wreckage could be lodged under peaks and rocks.
On Thursday, transport minister Liow Tiong Liow said the search would be suspended after the remaining 10,000 sq km of ocean was searched. The team has been assigned a 120,000 sq km block of the remote southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia.
The aircraft went missing on March 8, 2014, while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew on board. Scientists have determined from satellite data that the plane was diverted off its flight path and flown around Sumatra towards the southern Indian Ocean.