Hong Kong engineer’s deep-sea mission to find MH370 plane

For almost 18 months, an expert team of engineers, analysts and surveyors have been working round the clock tasked with finding the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in a bid to end the biggest aviation mystery.

Tuesday will mark the second anniversary of the plane’s disappearance. And with deep-sea search off the western coast of Australia yet to bear fruit, time is running out as authorities plan to wind up the operation in June.

Hong Kong engineer Gary Wong Wing-lun has played a key role in the search for MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean, working for Dutch contractor Fugro aboard the vessel Discovery.

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Wong remains optimistic about making a breakthrough. “I still have strong hope. When the plane is not in a current searched block, it simply means that chances the plane is located at the remaining unsurveyed blocks are higher,” he said.

The 37-year-old engineer and his colleagues painstakingly mapped the sea floor to visualise the task they faced.

The search has ventured into largely uncharted waters, with more being known about the surface of the moon than that particular seabed.

Facing depths of 4,000 metres, including a 1,200m underwater volcano and deep rift valleys made the search “super-challenging,” Wong said – and that was without factoring in the regular bad weather.

Despite the daunting challenges, the technology used by Fugro has yielded two uncharted shipwrecks which were initially thought to possibly have been the plane. “At first I was disappointed that it wasn’t from the plane, but finding those shipwrecks proves that Fugro deep-tow system is capable of detecting the tiniest man-made objects under water.”