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A detailed oceanographic map has surfaced that predicted 12 months ago that any debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 could wash up where a large piece of aircraft wing has been discovered on Reunion Island near Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.
The map was prepared last year and predicted the various possible paths of debris if MH370 did indeed crash into the water in the Southern Corridor, the vast area of the Indian Ocean that became the focus of international search efforts in the months after the plane disappeared.
Charitha Pattiaratchi, professor of coastal oceanography at the University of Western Australia, said on Thursday that the discovery of the flaperon — a hybrid between an aileron and a flap — fit exactly with his models for debris distribution.
The map, which Pattiaratchi provided to Business Insider, shows where the debris would spread over various time periods, and Reunion Island is at the end point where the model says debris would travel after 18 months. It has now been over a year since the plane disappeared on March 8, 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing. It had 239 passengers and crew on board.
Here's how the model looks:
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"It makes sense based on some of the modeling we did 12 months ago, that some time with 18 to 24 months after [the crash] this could be the area the debris would have ended up in," Pattiaratchi told The Guardian.
Malaysia's deputy transport minister said on Thursday that it was "almost certain that the flaperon is from a Boeing 777 aircraft."
The disappearance of MH370 remains the greatest mystery in aviation history. The search has been progressively scaled back this year, after an Australian-led search of a previously unmapped area more than 1.1 million square kilometers in size.
