Where Is Flight MH370? Australian University Pinpoints Crash Site As Malaysia Airlines Plane Marks Third Disappearance Anniversary

A day before the third disappearance anniversary of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, an Australian university pinpointed at a location where the jet is believed to have crashed. Two years ago, the University of Western Australia (UWA) had predicted the location of the debris from missing Flight MH370.

Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi told local media Tuesday that the UWA’s reverse-drift modeling finds the resting place of Flight MH370 “at Longitude 96.5 E Latitude 32.5 S with a 40km (25 miles) radius.” This location is at the northern end of the 46,000 square miles of search area, which has been scoured with no concrete clues as to the whereabouts of the plane. The multimillion-dollar search in a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean was called off in January.

The UWA's prediction is based on an independent analysis of the satellite data and the drift analysis from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and is close to what is called the seventh arc, which was the area where the last known communication between Flight MH370 and a communication satellite was believed to have taken place.

“Of the 22 pieces of debris found, the locations of 18 were predicted by the UWA model,” Professor Pattiaratchi said, according to Perth Now.

Flight MH370 went missing with 239 people on board while traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. While several debris pieces have been found washed up on shores of some islands in the southern Indian Ocean, authorities are yet to unravel the plane's mysterious disappearance.

Since the plane went missing, several conspiracy theories made the rounds, including some blaming the pilot of deliberately crashing the plane while others pointed at technical fault and a possible hijack.As families of those on board look to find answers even after three years, a new lawsuit filed in the U.S. suggests the plane went down due to an electrical fault.

The lawsuit, filed against Boeing in U.S. District Court in South Carolina by Gregory Keith who is a special administrator for the families, claims an electrical fire caused the jet to depressurize, incapacitated the crew, and leading the plane to fly on auto-pilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed.

“The defects caused and/or allowed a massive and cascading sequence of electrical failures on-board the lost plane, which disabled vital systems, including the lost plane’s ACARS (Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System) and Mode S Transponder,” the lawsuit alleges, according to reports. “Boeing elected to equip the lost plane with these ineffective ELTs (Emergency Locator Transmitters) and ULBs (Underwater Locator Beacons) despite the presence of other readily available and reasonable alternative technologies that would have allowed the lost plane, the FDR (Flight Data Recorder), and the CVR (Cockpit Voice Recorder) to be tracked in real-time anywhere in the world, especially in cases of crashes, disruption of communications and other losses.”

Meanwhile, the families of 15 Chinese passengers on Tuesday filed papers in court announcing their intention to sue Malaysian Airline System BHD (MAS), the parent company of Malaysia Airlines, over the crash.

Malaysian media reports the families argue the disappearance of MH370 cannot have happened without culpable negligence by MAS, the Department of Civil Aviation, the Royal Malaysian Air Force and the Malaysian Government.