Six replicas of the flaperon will be sent to Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization's oceanography department in the island state of Tasmania where scientists will determine whether it is the wind or the currents that affect how they drift, Hood said. This will enable more accurate drift modeling than is currently available.
If more money becomes available, the Australian bureau, which is conducting the search on Malaysia's behalf, plans to fit the flaperons with satellite beacons and set them adrift at different points in the southern Indian Ocean around March 8 next year — the third anniversary of the disaster — and track their movements.
Meanwhile, barnacles found on the flaperon and an adjacent wing flap that washed up on Tanzania in June are being analyzed for clues to the latitudes they might have come from. The flap is in the Australian bureau's headquarters in Canberra where it has been scoured for clues by accident investigators.
Peter Foley, the bureau's director of Flight 370 search operations since the outset, said the enhanced drift modeling would hopefully narrow the next search area to a band of 5 degrees of latitude, or 340 miles.
Foley said: 'Even the best drift analysis is not going to narrow it down to X-marks-the-spot.' ....
...Foley said Australian analysis of the flap in Canberra suggested that it had not been deployed when it hit the water. It had been retracted inside the wing. A pilot attempting a soft landing would have extended the wing flaps. The Australians are awaiting the verdict of a Boeing accident investigation team on their findings.
Recent analysis of the final satellite signals also suggest the plane was descending at a rate of between 12,000 feet and 20,000 feet a minute before it crashed. A rate of 2,000 feet a minute would be typical of a controlled descent.
Foley said: 'The rate of descent combined with the position of the flap — if it's found that it is not deployed — will almost certainly rule out either a controlled ditch or glide.
'If it's not in a deployed state, it validates, if you like, where we've been looking.'
Crews have not given up hope of finding the plane in the current search area, which because of bad weather and 65-foot swells could take them until December to finish scanning.