Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 Engines Likely Intact, Searchers Say, But Infighting Slows Effort

Engines on the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 Boeing 777 that vanished out of the skies on March 8 are likely in one piece and lying on the ocean floor — and could be the key to unlocking the Flight MH370 mystery, search officials said on Wednesday.

“When we stipulated the requirements for the current search we thought about the smallest items that we would need to detect,” said Peter Foley, the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 search coordinator with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau. “We knew that the aircraft engines and the landing gear would remain relatively intact.”

The engines on a Boeing 777-200 are bigger than any other commercial airline engines, which means that they will prove relatively easy to spot — assuming that searchers spot any piece of the plane at all.

Since resuming the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane in September, in a remote region of the Indian Ocean, three high-tech search ships have scoured an area of ocean floor roughly the size of Florida — or the South American country of Uruguay — without spotting so much as a scrap of debris from the missing plane.

But over the past few days, details have emerged from inside the search team suggesting that internal disagreement over where, exactly, the plane is most likely to have fallen from the sky, may have slowed the Malaysia Airlines search effort.

There are five separate expert teams working to pinpoint the most likely area where Flight MH370 would have crashed into the ocean. Those expert teams represent the Australian military, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, the French Thales Group — a satellite manufacturer — Boeing itself, and Inmarsat, the British satellite firm whose data originally led searchers to the Indian Ocean after starting to search in the South China Sea.

Each group analyzed the MH370 flight data independently. But according to a Wall Street Journal report Monday, three of the groups agreed on one possible crash area while the other two saw the plane coming down in a nearby, but different stretch of ocean.

“Originally we thought we had a consensus among the five groups, based on the best data available at the time,” ATSB Chief Martin Dolan told the Journal. “Once we refined the data again the methodologies diverged.”

Dolan would not reveal which of the groups agreed with each other. In fact, he denied that the groups actually “disagreed” at all, saying instead that the varying results arose from “just the deliberate application of differing analysis models.”

Dolan added that searchers have “high confidence” that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 came down in one of the areas identified by the expert teams, but even their analysis did not account for all of the possible flight paths the missing plane could have taken.