Many people,including search officials themselves,favour the first explanation. They point to the fact the ocean is a vast place,so it’s not unsurprising the search came up empty. In their view,the plane simply must be there somewhere,either just beyond the defined search area or perhaps in a seabed crevice that the aircraft unluckily fell into.

Those eventualities are certainly possible,but,I’d argue,quite unlikely. Yes,the ocean is big,but the Inmarsat signals that the searchers were working with had well-defined margins of error. Bigger than a GPS error,but equally quantifiable. If you do the math,it turns out to be very hard to find a spot outside the search area where the plane could have gone.

That leaves the possibility that the search officials made a mistake. That when Inmarsat carried out their initial analysis they made a fundamental error that predestined all their subsequent efforts to failure.

Such a thing has happened before. When Air France flight 447 went missing over the Atlantic in 2009,investigators laid out an underwater search area using probability calculations much like those later used for MH370. When their seabed scan came up empty,they revisited their initial assumptions and realised they had made a shaky assumption about the black boxes’ acoustic pingers. They redrew their probability maps and found the wreckage within days.

In the case of MH370,various initial assumptions could have been at fault. The Netflix documentary describes several theories,none of them proven and most of them criticised as “conspiracy theories” by people who would prefer to think that the official analysis was correct. Yet where has that official analysis got us?

The only reasonablly satisfying narrative that was ever on the table – that a suicidal pilot flew the plane straight and fast over the southern Indian Ocean until he ran out of fuel,before nose-diving into the sea – is at this point itself seriously problematic.

As they say in addiction recovery,the first step to getting better is admitting you have a problem. Now it’s clear the official analysis has failed,it’s time to start the search again from scratch. Australia should set up an all-new independent commission that can take a hard,fresh look at every piece of evidence from the case and revisit every assumption one by one.

The hour is late,but it’s not too late. Nine years on,let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work. It’s time to find that plane.

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