In our last episode, we talked about the search of the seabed, which started in October 2014. By that time the plane had been missing for 8 months. And while the seabed search was everyone’s best hope for finding the black box and solving the mystery, people hadn’t forgotten about floating debris.

You’ll recall that in the first month after the disappearance, there had been an extremely extensive search of the ocean surface by ships and airplanes from many nations, and they hadn’t spotted anything.

When Australia called off the surface search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on April 28, Prime Minister Tony Abbot explained that “It is highly unlikely at this stage that we will find any aircraft debris on the ocean surface. By this stage, 52 days into the search, most material would have become waterlogged and sunk.”

But would the debris really have sunk? Modern aircraft are made of metal, composites, and plastic, materials that do not get waterlogged. If, as the Australian Transport Safety Board (ATSB) believed was most likely, MH370 ran out of fuel and then crashed, it would have been moving at hundreds of miles per hour when it hit the sea. Much of the resulting debris would have settled down through the water column, but innumerable pieces would have remained afloat. After Air France Flight 447 went down in the middle of the Atlantic in 2009, searchers found some 3,000 pieces of debris scattered across the surface.

Given that no debris from MH370 had been spotted from the air, a lot of people thought that the first hard proof of the plane’s fight might well take the form of flotsam washing up on a beach somewhere.

The question was, where would it wash up?

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