Relating to the ongoing search for Fight 370, the Malaysian Airlines flight that disappeared on March 8. Optical Engineering Professor Dr. Duncan Moore released a video explaining the reasons for the difficulty in locating the plane.
Following an National Public Radio (NPR) interview on Tuesday, April 17, Dr. Moore expressed concerns that listeners would have a hard time understanding the logistics of finding the plane without proper visual aide. He teamed up with UR’s Public Relations Department to create a video illustrating the complications of the sound waves passing through the water.
Moore’s sub-specialty involves optical materials through which light does not pass in a straight line. He explained that normally, light travels in a straight line until it is reflected or refracted by a surface. In the materials that his department makes out of glass, plastic, etc., the light will go straight until it hits the materials, which cause its path to curve.
“That turns out to be the exact same problem that sound has in the water,” Moore explained.
Moore continued by stating that temperature differences and changes in pressure morph the sound waves, making them go down a greater distance than they come up. Thus, the waves are not symmetrical and are centered them around the 1.2 kilometer depth.
Because of this, searchers could potentially get a signal from the plane’s black box, but as they move closer towards the pinging, they lose the signal. As a result, they aren’t sure whether they have moved towards or away from the plane.
“It can be very frustrating trying to find [the signals],” Moore said, “so now what they have been doing is they have been taking a instrument that generates sound waves out […] to see if they can get any reflections off things.”
However, while Moore believes searchers will find Flight 370 eventually, it may take them a while to find it. After all, he explained, it took 73 years to find the Titanic, and two years to find the Air France Flight 447 that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean.
To try and prevent this kind of loss from happening again, by 2020, all crafts will be required to have some sort of GPS on board.
Johnson is a member of the class of 2016.
