A new search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has been launched more than a decade after the plane went missing in one of aviation’s greatest enduring mysteries.
Maritime exploration firm Ocean Infinity has resumed the hunt for the missing plane, Malaysian transport minister Anthony Loke said on Tuesday.
Loke told reporters the contract details between Malaysia and the firm were still being finalised but welcomed “the proactiveness of Ocean Infinity to deploy their ships” to begin the search for the plane, which went missing in March 2014.
Details about how long the search would last had not been negotiated yet, he said. He also did not provide details about when exactly the British firm had restarted its hunt.
MH370’s disappeared from radar shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur airport in March 2014. It was bound for Beijing, with 12 crew and 227 passengers on board. The plane has never been found, and the reason for its disappearance is unknown.
“We’re very relieved and pleased that the search is resuming once again after such a long hiatus,” Malaysian Grace Nathan, 36, who lost her mother on the doomed jet, told AFP.
Jaquita Gonzales, 62, wife of MH370 flight supervisor Patrick Gomes, said she hoped the resumption of the search would bring her family much-needed closure.
“We just want to know where it is and what happened,” she said. “Memories come back like yesterday, it’s fresh in our heads.”
Marine tracking website Marinetraffic.com showed that the Ocean Infinity vessel was in the south Indian ocean as of 23 February.
Malaysia agreed to resume the search in December 2024, with Ocean Infinity conducting the search on a “no-find-no-fee” basis. Loke said the government would sign a contract for 18 months, in return for which Ocean Infinity would receive $70m if the wreckage was located and verified. The search would cover 15,000 sq km, Loke said.
On 8 March 2024, on the 10-year anniversary of the disappearance, Australia offered the Malaysian government support for a renewed search. Eight Australians were on board the flight. But on Tuesday a spokesperson for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said that Australian authorities were not involved in the renewed search.
Flight MH370, a B777-200 aircraft, departed Kuala Lumpur at 12.41am local time on 8 March 2-14, bound for Beijing. The plane was last seen on military radar at 2.14am, heading west over the strait of Malacca. Half an hour later, the airline announced it had lost contact with the plane, which was due to land at its destination about 6.30am.
The families of those on board are still waiting for answers about what happened to their loved ones. Some travelled to Madagascar in 2016 to comb the beaches there for debris: pieces of the plane had been found off the Tanzanian and Mozambican coasts.
In January 2017, after nearly three years of searching 120,000 sq km in the southern Indian Ocean, Australian authorities ended the underwater hunt for the wreckage. On 3 October that year, Australian investigators delivered their final report on the disappearance, saying the inability to bring closure for victims’ families was a “great tragedy” and “almost inconceivable” in the modern age.
Among the questions that remain is why the plane made a seemingly controlled turn off course towards the Indian ocean and, critically, why two pieces of key communication and tracking equipment on the plane went silent.
Theories of what happened have ranged from a pilot “gone rogue” to sabotage and conspiracies that the flight was shot down or “disappeared” by a nefarious government agency and landed at a dark site, either because of sensitive cargo or a politically significant passenger.
Data recovered from a home-built flight simulator owned by the pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, showed that someone had plotted a course to the southern Indian Ocean.
Ocean Infinity, based in Britain and the United States, carried out an unsuccessful hunt in 2018.
With Agence France-Presse