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Inside the cockpit: The hunt for Flight MH370

They stare at a punishingly unbroken expanse of gray water that seems to blend into the threatening clouds filling the horizon.

They press their foreheads against the plane’s windows, their eyes darting up and down, left and right, looking for anything that could explain the fate of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.

The hunt for Flight MH370, which vanished on March 8 during a trip from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, is complicated in just about every way imaginable, from the vastness of the search area to its distance from land to the brutal weather that plagues it, rescuers said.

But for all the fancy technology on board the planes and vessels scouring the swirling waters, the best tool searchers have is their own eyes.

They can spot things man-made equipment cannot.

But they are also subject to the peculiarities of the human brain. They can play tricks. They can blink at the wrong moment. They can — and do — grow weary.

“It is incredibly fatiguing work,” says Flight Lt. Stephen Graham, tactical coordinator for the crew on board a Royal New Zealand Air Force P-3 Orion that has made six sorties into the southern Indian Ocean search zone.

“If it’s bright and glaring, obviously sunglasses help, but there’s only so much you can do.”

Royal New Zealand Air Force Flight Lt. Stephen Graham in front of his P-3 Orion search plane.AP

Search and rescue makes up a small part of what Graham’s squadron does, and visual spotting is an even smaller subset of that. But everyone on board has had to learn how to do it — and it’s not as simple as most people think.

Graham learned as part of a yearlong training stint in Canada, further refined his skills during a six-month course in New Zealand and has had ongoing training since.

Crew members have to know what they’re doing, because the electronic equipment on board sometimes doesn’t.

“The P-3 has a lot of really advanced sensors and they’re really useful in our other roles, but for search and rescue, when you can’t guarantee a large or a metallic target, vision is the best that you’ve got,” Graham says.

Inside the shadowy confines of New Zealand’s P-3 Orion, the spotters drop into their seats, which they swivel toward the window and inch forward before leaning into the bubble-shaped windows that extend outward from the plane, permitting them to see straight down.

When the oils from their skin smudge the window, they wipe away the marks with eyeglass cloths.

There is one spotter on each side of the AP-3C Orion search planes.AP

There are two spotters, on either side of the aircraft. They rest their elbows on a padded shelf, their binoculars sitting at arm’s reach.

A small pocket near each window contains safety manuals, paperwork and a handful of barf bags. On at least one particularly bumpy flight, the crew had to use them.

They don’t have to have naturally perfect vision.

Graham, for example, sports brown thick-rimmed eyeglasses and admits his eyesight isn’t as good as it once was. But they do need to be able to correct it to 20/20 with contacts or glasses, and they must exhibit excellent attention to detail.

That’s because even the tiniest detail could signify their target — white objects, anything angular that might be man-made, anything orange — since aircraft items that are designed to be located are generally yellow or orange.

Some of the seaweed in the search area is bright orange, causing hearts to briefly race when it comes into view.

They’re trained to constantly move their eyes — in an X pattern, or up and down — whatever keeps them alert, says Ron Bishop, who once trained spotters and was formerly second in charge of the US Air Force Rescue and Special Operations School at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, NM.

The monotony of the search plays tricks on the eyes and minds of the search crews.AP

Still, the monotony of the sea can do funny things to the eyes.

“When your eyes sit at a single focus, they do seem to lock into that and it’s very easy to glaze over and start missing things,” Graham says.

“So one of the things we’re trained to do is just shift your focal point — so look at the wingtip or look inside just for half a second and then out again, and try and keep your mind active.”

Breaks are critical in order to prevent them from slipping into a haze, much like a passenger who starts to daydream while staring out the window, Bishop says.

“As humans, we’re not really good monitors, we’re not really good at sitting in a control room and watching for the gauges to move,” Bishop says. “And that’s really what you’re doing with search and rescue and recovery is you’re looking for something.”

On a recent flight over the search zone, the US Navy’s P-8 Poseidon flew in slow, straight, parallel sweeps, scanning the ocean below with both radar and the spotters’ eyes.

A Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion aircraft sits in the twilight after returning from a search flight.

“Now we’re just mowing the lawn,” said Lt. Kyle Atakturk, describing the monotonous search pattern.

The weather further complicates their jobs. When it’s calm and the seas are glassy, anything unusual is easy to spot. When the wind is up and the waves are high, the added motion and color from the whitecaps are a distraction. The speed of the aircraft, too, means there is little time to verify what an object is before it has slipped from view.

“Thinking about that is what keeps you going over what can be really, really long and quite dull missions at times,” Graham says. “Is it going to be behind this next wave?”