Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 has remained a mystery roughly four months since it vanished in the thin air while traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Up to this point, there's no clear reason behind the disappearance of the ill-fated jetliner, but there are at least bits of reports on the status of the plane before it travelled into the unknown.
Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief commissioner Martin Dolan said in a recent interview that MH370 was on autopilot while traveling across the Southern Indian Ocean. Dolan added the latest report was derived after months of analyzing data exchanged between the plane and a satellite.
"Certainly for its path across the Indian Ocean, we are confident that the aircraft was operating on autopilot until it ran out of fuel," Dolan told reporters in Canberra via Al Jazeera News.
Meanwhile, Australian transport Minister Warren Truss said the investigation is still ongoing to determine the real motive of the pilots at the time the autopilot was switched on and deflected from its original destination in Beijing.
We couldn't accurately, nor have we attempted to, fix the moment when it as put on autopilot,'' Transport Minister Warren Truss said in the press conference. "It will be a matter for the Malaysian-based investigation to look at precisely when it may have been put on autopilot."
4-minute Corkscrew Spiral
Considering the report that MH370 did run out of fuel while flying across the vast Indian Ocean, investigators believed the plane could have been caught in a four-minute corkscrew spiral before it went deep into the ocean floor.
But investigators believe when the Boeing 777 ran out of fuel, one engine quit before the other. That would put the jetliner in a corkscrew spiral as it would start losing altitude, taking four minutes to spin all the way down to the ocean surface.
Because of the new development, search-ops officials has announced another search area several hundred kilometers off the most-recent suspected crash site of the plane - 1,800 km off Australia's west coast.
It would be a 60,000 square kilometers search area in the Indian Ocean that air crews have already scouted before officials called off the aerial search since the debris would likely sunk by then.
Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 vanished last March 8, carrying 12 Malaysian crew and 227 passengers of 14 nationalities.
Superpowers such as the United States, Australia, Great Britain, Japan, South Korea and China have participated in the search and recovery missions, but the whereabouts of the plane remains unknown up to now, making it one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
