The search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has been bogged down by disagreements among the investigators overseeing it, according to a report.
These disagreements, as the Wall Street Journal reported this week, have made the already difficult operation more complex. The search, which resumed two months ago, is taking place in the Indian Ocean, and it has been hampered by weather and technical problems.
Five teams of experts involved in the investigation, including Boeing and the Australian military, have resulted in search vessels being deployed in two different areas in the southern Indian Ocean, which are hundreds of miles apart and overlap in some areas.
The chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, Martin Dolan, said that searchers said around 80 percent of probable crash sites will be investigated before government money runs dry.
The Journal said that three of the groups of experts disagreed with the other two groups. There were different models of analyzing communications between the Inmarsat satellite and Flight 370; one model assumed the plane went on autopilot until it crashed after running out of fuel, and the other didn’t make any assumptions on how the plane was being piloted.
“Originally we thought we had a consensus among the five groups, based on the best data available at the time,” Dolan told the Journal. “Once we refined the data again the methodologies diverged.”
