The missing Malaysia Airlines plane hasn’t been found but a report from the Australian government says that the plane ran out of fuel and crashed into the Indian Ocean as the search for wreckage resumed this week.
Flight MH370 vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing, China on March 8 with 239 passengers on board.
The disappearance sparked a widespread hunt fore the plane, involving numerous countries.
The Australian Transportation Safety Bureau said in an interim report (pdf) published this week that the flight went into a slow left turn and spiraled into the Indian Ocean when its fuel ran out.
The report was based off of investigations of the different scenarios that could have happened, including flight simulations, and concluded that the plane entered “a descending spiraling low bank angle left turn” and hit the ocean “a relatively short distance after the last engine flameout.”
Crews looking for wreckage of the plane returned to work this week after the search was put on hold for several months while Australian authorities mapped the seafloor in the southern Indian Ocean.
GO Phoenix is one of multiple ships that will be involved in the rebooted search. It marked the reboot when it began sonar sweeps of the ocean floor on Monday, reported the Wall Street Journal.
The ship began its mission toward the southernmost end of an area covering about (60,000 square kilometers--that the search previously focused on, according to Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
The search has shifted south as investigators, including the safety bureau, concluded that the Boeing 777 went faster and lew farther than projected by many earlier analyses. The shift involves more obstacles because the ocean is deeper and more remote, and storms tend to be more violent. Two other ships were being outfitted with proper equipment, with the aim of setting sail by next week.
