Malaysia Airlines missing plane could be as far south as the Cocos Islands, Heard Island | News.com.au
ON Heard Island, the closest landfall to the Australian search zone for the missing Malaysian Airlines 777, all is quiet.
As usual.
No one lives there. There’s not a building on the place, let alone a runway.
It is home to Australia’s only active volcanoes and four species of penguin. It’s one of the most inhospitable and pristine environments in the world.
Likewise on the Cocos Islands, also way out west in the Indian Ocean and another of our farthest-flung outposts, there is no sign of any search activity.
As Australia takes charge of the southern sector search for the missing jet, they are seeking the possible location of a satellite “ping” that came from the airliner some seven hours after it went missing off civilian radar.
If the jet took the southerly route — rather than the other possibility, of flying northwest towards Kazakhstan — it likely crossed somewhere over the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, 2770 kilometres northwest of Perth, before heading on towards Heard Island.
A law officer on Cocos confirmed this. “Mate, I can’t say anything but I can just say there’s no extra activity on Cocos Islands. There’s nothing unusual going on here.”
The Australian search area is located 3000km southwest of Perth, covering 600,000km of empty, freezing ocean.
It is being conducted by three (and soon four) RAAF P-3 Orion Aircraft, a New Zealand Orion and a deep-sea-probing, state-of-the-art, submarine-searching US P-8 Poseidon.
The tiny Heard Island and McDonald Island grouping are approximately 1000km further southwest of the search zone.
Located only 1500km north of Antarctica, volcanoes rise sharply from the sea. It is considered a hostile, icy place at the best of times.