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‘I’m trying to find MH370 – this is why sound may lastly remedy the thriller’

A researcher believes he may be closing in on the mystery of the vanished MH370 flight thanks to a sound that could give the world the answers everyone has been hoping far.

A futile and more than decade-long search for the Boeing 777, which disappeared in 2014, has included radar, satellite, air and sonar research. But now it’s believed something quite simple could reveal the truth of what happened that fateful day.

Cardiff University researchers say they have reason to believe that what happened to the 239 people aboard could be uncovered thanks to hydrophone recordings – used to detect nuclear explosions and to monitor pressure changes in the ocean, reports news.com.au.

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The Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was an international passenger flight operated by Malaysia Airlines that disappeared from radar on March 8, 2014. At the time it was flying from Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia to its planned destination, Beijing Capital International Airport in China.



Dr Usama Kadri, a lecturer in Applied Mathematics at Cardiff Univesity
Dr Usama Kadri, a lecturer in Applied Mathematics at Cardiff Univesity is looking for answers

At the time there were 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board and its disappearance led to a search effort stretching from the Indian Ocean, west of Australia, to Central Asia.

The baffling nature of the loss of Flight 370 is such that it has become one of history’s most famous missing aircraft with people as desperate for answers today as they were back then.

Parts of the wreckage have washed up since but the location of whereabouts of the plane’s demise, or what went wrong, has never been determined.



A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777
The aircraft’s disappearance has baffled experts

Dr Usama Kadri, a mathematician and engineer at the university, says hydrophones that could provide answers were in operation at Western Australia’s Cape Leeuwin and the United States Indian Ocean naval base at Diego Garcia at the time of the flight’s disappearance.

He writes in The Conversation: “A 200-tonne aircraft crashing at a speed of 200 metres per second would release the kinetic energy equivalent to a small earthquake.”

He said this would be large enough to be recorded by hydrophones as far as thousands of kilometres away and has led a team looking for clues in recordings of other aircraft crashes.

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