Malaysia plans to restart private search for missing plane: NPR

The Malaysian government plans to allow a renewed private search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which disappeared more than a decade ago and remains one of the world’s most perplexing aviation mysteries.

To this day, none of the bodies of the 239 passengers and crew members abroad have been found.

Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke announced on Friday that the search will be conducted by Ocean Infinity, a Texas-based marine robotics company that previously led a search for MH370 in 2018.

The new hunt will focus on a different location of 15,000 square kilometers, or 5,800 square kilometers, in the southern Indian Ocean based on “latest information and data analysis conducted by experts and researchers,” Loke said.

It will operate on a “no find, no fee” principle, meaning that Ocean Infinity will only be paid if the plane’s wreckage is discovered. The reward is 70 million dollars, according to Associated Press. The terms and conditions of the agreement will be finalized in 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 obligation to the families, especially to the next of kin, that the government will continue this search,” Loke added.

On Friday, the association for the families of the passengers and crew abroad MH370 said †they supported a new search.

“We, the relatives, have endured over a decade of uncertainty,” they wrote in a statement. “We hope that the terms of the renewed search are finalized at the earliest and the decks are cleared for the search to begin.”

Time line

The effort to restart the search for the lost plane comes in the year that marks a decade since its disappearance.

On March 8, 2014, 239 passengers and crew members boarded a Boeing 777 flight traveling from Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, to Beijing. The plane disappeared 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 USA. 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 with no clear explanation as to why the plane went down.

“It is almost unthinkable and certainly socially unacceptable in the modern era of aviation with 10 million passengers boarding commercial aircraft every day that a large commercial aircraft is missing and the world does not know for sure what became of the aircraft and those on board,” the final report on MH370, led by Australia, said 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 ended unsuccessfully.

Why investigators believe MH370 is in the Indian Ocean

Locating lost aircraft 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 that the missing plane is there.

There are 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 circled until it ran out of fuel, investigators said in 2017.

A series of pings from the aircraft to an orbiting satellite also indicated that the aircraft flew for hours deep in the southern Indian Ocean. Debris from the plane that washed up on the coast of Africa also supports the theory that the plane crashed in the distant waters west of Australia.

It is important to save the plane. Until then, investigators say the cause of the plane’s disappearance will never be known for sure.