New 10-Years-Later Search for MH370 - By Why Not . .?

WASHINGTON - Dec. 23, 2024 - PRLog -- Malaysia's agreement to resume the search for the wreckage of its missing flight MH370, should serve to spur requirements for a simple improvement which would make such searches completely unnecessary, says MIT-trained Professor John Banzhaf, who has two U.S. Patents and many technical papers to his credit.

The fruitless searches for the MH370 wreckage to date have cost some $200 million.

But such searches where wreckages were never found could be prevented at a cost of only a few thousand dollars, says Banzhaf.

A simple piece of existing technology – known as floatable EPIRBs  – should have told us exactly where the MH370 and other flights came down within minutes after each crash occurred - possibly even in time to save some passengers clinging to floating debris.

Such devices, with a simple update improvement, could also provide all of the airplane's black box data, even if the wreckage itself cannot be located or recovered, or if the actual devices are too broken from the crash to yield useful data.

Ships are required to have on board EPIRBs [Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons], a technology which has been in use for decades in marine environments.  When activated (e.g. by falling into the water) these devices send out an emergency distress signal to search-and-rescue satellites which indicates the identity (call sign) of the caller.

If linked  – as even small personal hand-held EPIRB devices used by campers now commonly are – to a GPS locator of the kind found in many cell phones, the EPIRB would also provide their location with almost pinpoint (within meters) accuracy, and also permit rescuers or others who subsequently arrive on the scene to hone in on its signal.

"This is much better than devices sending out pings from vast depths which can be detected only by craft closer than a few miles away searching a wide swath of ocean," says Banzhaf, noting that the new search for MH370 will focus on a different area of seabed covering around 5,800 square miles – slightly bigger than Northern Ireland.

It's a lot easier to recover this invaluable data from floating EPIRB devices sending out homing signals than to try to retrieve the actual block boxes which are almost certainly deep under water, and which may be so damaged by the time they are recovered that the information is lost, says Banzhaf.

Many EPIRBs intended for ocean use are designed to be floatable, so that they are automatically released if the water pressure on them exceeds that found at a specified depth.

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