Seven months after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, PBS' Nova explores how somebody could have taken control of the plane and what new technology might have prevented it from disappearing.
Why Planes Vanish, narrated by Miles O'Brien, (Wednesday 9 p.m. ET, check local listings) details how signals from the plane with 239 people aboard winked out over a period of eight hours after the plane took off.
Crews resumed the search Monday for the Boeing 777 after months spent mapping part of the bottom of the Indian Ocean. The program explores how planes remain difficult to track over oceans if communications equipment fails – or is turned off.
"Somebody should know where you are at all times," says Mark Weiss, a retired 777 pilot.
The flight took off March 8 from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing. But the last radio communication between pilots and air-traffic controllers occurred less than an hour after takeoff, and transponders stopped signaling the aircraft's location before Vietnam began tracking the sophisticated plane.
Satellite signals once per hour for the next seven hours offer the only clues that the plane's final location is in the remote ocean about 1,000 miles west of Australia. But the lack of any debris from the plane leaves experts scratching their heads.
John Goglia, a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board, says a loss of radio and transponder communications could signal a catastrophic failure like a fire or explosion. But because the plane kept flying for hours, it suggests human intervention.
"The dots don't line up," Goglia says. "It doesn't make sense."
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which has been coordinating the mapping of the ocean floor, said three ships funded by Malaysia and Australia will search the ocean floor: Fugro Discovery and Fugro Equator from Fugro Survey and GO Phoenix from Phoenix International.
"The complexities surrounding the search cannot be understated," the bureau said in a statement. "While it is impossible to determine with certainty where the aircraft may have entered the water, all the available data and analysis indicate a highly probable search area close to a long but narrow arc of the southern Indian Ocean."
That slice of ocean where the search is focused is the size of West Virginia. The area is roughly five times the size of the area of the Atlantic that crews spent two years searching before finding the wreckage of Air France Flight 447 in 2011.
"The haystack is enormous right now," says David Gallo, head of special projects at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who helped find the Air France plane. "And there's a lot of doubt about whether there is a needle in that haystack."
The program includes a video tour available on the Internet that shows this type of plane's electronics bay, where someone could unlock the cockpit door or control the plane from outside the cockpit.
Why Planes Vanish also explores proposals to adopt more satellite tracking for planes, to replace radar that covers less than 3% of the earth's surface. Radar reaches only about 200 miles from its antennas, leaving vast swaths of ocean unmonitored.
But satellites circle the world, although regulators would have to reach agreement on how tracking should work and airlines would have to adopt the costlier monitoring equipment.
As international groups debate those policies, Goglia says investigators will keep searching for the plane for weeks or years if it takes that to find it.
"Sooner or later, the secrets will be given up," he said.
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