The Difficulty and Mystery of MH370 Search Explained in Two Graphics

WSJ: Three days after Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 went missing on its way to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, investigators are still at a loss to explain what happened or even where the plane is. (Malaysia’s acting transport minister, Hishamuddin Hussein, used the word “bewildered.”)

Almost as surprising as the Saturday morning disappearance of the Boeing 777-200, which happened without so much as a peep from the pilots, is the absence of any floating wreckage. Debris spotted earlier by search and rescue planes in the Gulf of Thailand turned out not to have come from the jet, and oil slicks found in Malaysian waters north of where the plane lost contact are confirmed to have come from fuel used in ships, not aviation fuel.

Large passenger jets have disappeared before, most notably Air France flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on its way to Paris from Rio de Janeiro in 2009. It took search and rescue teams five days to find the first wreckage in that case, and another two years to recover the plane’s black box. But as the first chart below shows, AF447 crashed in a much deeper part of the ocean 3,900 meters compared with the Gulf of Thailand’s average of 45 meters.

The second chart shows how shallow the Gulf of Thailand is compared with the length of a Boeing 777, which makes the absence of debris even more surprising, though winter water currents could carry any away from the site of a crash.

Authorities have expanded their search to the western side of the Malaysian peninsula because, officials say, Malaysian radar showed the plane may have tried to turn around in that direction. As WSJ’s aerospace reporter Jon Ostrower noted on Twitter, if it were found there, the jet would have had to cross the country again unnoticed.

Josh Chin