The most obvious candidate is that the plane wasn't pilotless at the end. "If it was manned it could glide for a long way," the director of Fugro, one of the companies conducting the search, told Reuters this week. "You could glide it for further than our search area is, so I believe the logical conclusion will be well maybe that is the other scenario."
If he's right, then a logical course of action would be to keep looking further outward from the final ping arc. Now that 46,000 square miles have been scanned, searching another 115,000 doesn't seem so crazy. Sure, we'd be following a $130 million, two-year fruitless search with one on the order of $325 million and five years, but that doesn't seem so extravagant when you realize that a single 777 costs $250 million.
The problem is that there's no guarantee the plane would turn up in the extended area, either. What if a different assumption is the faulty one-for example, the flight-path calculation? Maybe the plane took a lower-probability route that veered further to the north. Indeed, several studies of debris drift routes suggest that the plane hit the water somewhere in that direction. "The best guess that we think is that it's probably around the Broken Ridge region, which is slightly to the north of the area that they're looking at," Western Australian University oceanographer Charitha Pattiaratchi told the South China Morning Post.
We may never know. Today's announcement of the looming end of the search means neither of these possibilities will be explored. Although China, France and Malaysia are technically "suspending" the search until "credible new information" turns up, no one really believes that this will ever happen. It's game over.
Three months ago, Martin Dolan, then head of the Australian agency leading the seabed search, told the Guardian that he still felt it "very likely" that the plane would be found in the current search area because the investigators' technical analysis was "a very reliable proposition." It was the latest-and ultimately the last-in a series of official assurances that stretched back two years. What's now clear is that behind that the search leaders' confidence was not based on well-grounded certainty but rather on a calculated gamble. That gamble didn't pay off.
