Director James Cameron Predicted New Search For Missing Flight

Having been the director of such water-themed films as ‘Titanic’ and ‘The Abyss’ – and having a certain familiarity with submersibles – filmmaker James Cameron said on a Reddit “Ask me Anything” chat Saturday that he knew how to find missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

And his prediction is playing out as we speak.

“Well, I know how it will be done,” he said. “If these pings that they're receiving are confirmed as being from the flight recorders, then they'll triangulate the acoustic data that they have so far, and they'll generate what's called a search box. I don't know how big that will be, but it might be 25-30 miles on a side, it might be a very large piece of ocean.”

In fact, at 5 a.m. (EDT) this morning, the United States Navy deployed the submersible probe called the Bluefin-21, which takes two hours to be lowered to the ocean floor, where it will begin using side-scan sonar – the acoustic technology Cameron spoke of – to search the ocean floor.

The Bluefin-21 can search for 16 hours before it will take another two hours to bring it back to the surface. It will take another four hours after that to download and analyze the data retrieved.

Most of the Reddit questions directed at the “I’m the King of the World!” Oscar-winning director were about filmmaking, especially the highly anticipated "Avatar" sequels, three of which will film simultaneously and are in pre-production, he said.

But when somebody asked him about the mysterious missing flight, which has gone on for more than a month now, Cameron lent his expertise.

Cameron said there are a suite of tools that can operate at the depths of the Indian Ocean where MH370 is thought to be.

“The next step would be to use an AUV, an autonomous underwater vehicle, and have it run at 400 or 500 feet above the bottom and do a sonar profile of the bottom,” he said. “It does that by running a search pattern, kind of like mowing the lawn. That takes days or weeks to do. Then you analyze any signatures that are anomalous, that don't look like flat bottom, and you say ‘Are those rocks? Is that geology or does that look like the piece of an aircraft?’”

Once that’s established, Cameron said, you go back, either with that type of vehicle or an ROV (a remotely operated vehicle) that would be lowering a video camera hanging down from a ship on a cable.

“And then you'd be able to identify whether that target was in fact the aircraft you are looking for,” he said. “So that's how it would be done. But it all hinges on whether or not those pings are actually from the black box, and not from something else, like a scientific instrument that's drifted off course or whatever.”