The Malaysian government plans to allow a renewed private search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which vanished over a decade ago and remains one of the world's most puzzling aviation mysteries.
To this day, none of the bodies of the 239 passengers and crew members aboard have been recovered.
Malaysia's Transport Minister Anthony Loke announced Friday that the search will be conducted by Ocean Infinity, a Texas-based marine robotics firm which had previously led a search for MH370 in 2018.
The new hunt will focus on a different location at 15,000 square kilometers, or 5,800 square miles, in the southern Indian Ocean based on the "latest information and data analyses conducted by experts and researchers," Loke said.
It will operate on a "no find, no fee" principle, meaning Ocean Infinity will only get paid if the aircraft's wreckage is discovered. The reward stands at $70 million, according to the Associated Press. The terms and conditions of the deal will be finalized by early 2025, with hopes that the search will take place between January and April, Malaysia's government news agency, Bernama, reported.
"It is our responsibility and our obligation and our commitment to the families, especially to the next-of-kins that the government will continue this search," Loke added.
On Friday, the association for the families of the passengers and crew aboard MH370 said †hey were in support of a fresh search.
"We, the next of kin, have endured over a decade of uncertainty," they wrote in a statement. "We hope that the terms of the renewed search are finalised at the earliest and the decks are cleared for the search to begin."
Timeline
The effort to restart the search for the lost flight comes in the year that marks a decade since its disappearance.
On March 8, 2014, 239 passengers and crew members boarded a Boeing 777 plane traveling from Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur, to Beijing. The aircraft vanished from radar screens somewhere between Malaysia and Vietnam less than an hour after takeoff.
Among the missing are people from China, Indonesia, Australia, India, France, Canada, New Zealand, Ukraine and the U.S. Five of the passengers were under the age of 5.
The disappearance launched the largest-ever multinational air-sea search at the time, involving 33 ships, 58 aircraft, dozens of countries, and costing over $150 million. Despite these efforts, the search was called off in 2017 without a clear explanation of why the plane went down.
"It is almost inconceivable and certainly societally unacceptable in the modern aviation era with 10 million passengers boarding commercial aircraft every day, for a large commercial aircraft to be missing and for the world not to know with certainty what became of the aircraft and those on board," said the final report on MH370, led by Australia, back in 2017.
In 2018, the Malaysian government approved a private search by Ocean Infinity under a similar no-find, no-fee agreement. After nearly four months, the mission concluded with no success.
Why investigators believe MH370 is in the Indian Ocean
Locating lost planes in the deep sea is notoriously challenging. Previous searches in the Indian Ocean, which is the world's third largest, have come up empty-handed but that does not rule out the possibility the missing aircraft lies there.
There's several reasons why Malaysian investigators believe MH370 crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.
In a flight simulator used to recreate the flight, the simulated plane traveled to the southern Indian Ocean where it flew around until it ran out of a fuel, investigators said in 2017.
A series of pings from the aircraft to an orbiting satellite also indicated that the plane flew for hours deep in the southern Indian Ocean. Debris from the aircraft, which washed up on the coast of Africa, also backs the theory that the plane plunged in the remote waters west of Australia.
Recovering the aircraft is important. Until then, investigators say the cause of the plane's disappearance will never be known for certain.
Copyright 2024 NPR
