Malaysia approves new search for missing flight MH370

Telegraph

20-03-2025

Malaysia has approved a new search for the missing flight MH370, which vanished while travelling between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing with 239 people on board more than a decade ago.
The country's cabinet authorised a 'no find, no fee' contract with Ocean Infinity, a UK-based marine robotics company, to probe a 15,000 sq km area in the southern Indian Ocean.
If successful in the search, the firm will receive £56 million. But the wreckage and the missing black boxes would also help solve one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries.
It is now more than a decade since MH370 disappeared from air traffic controllers' screens on March 8 2014, less than an hour after take-off. Friends and relatives of those on board have long been haunted by what happened to them.
Although debris believed to be part of the Boeing 777 plane has washed up on the shores of the Indian Ocean in the years since, extensive searches for the wreckage by the three nations involved – Malaysia, China and Australia – have so far proven futile.
A multi-national search that covered 74,000 sq km was abandoned in 2017, while a separate hunt by Ocean Infinity involving autonomous underwater vehicles was called off in May 2018 after just three months.
At that point, the Malaysian government said efforts would be resumed only if 'credible new evidence' emerged.
Oliver Punkett, the Ocean Infinity CEO, said this year that the technology available to launch a search had improved, and that analysts had refined their estimates of where the aircraft may have plunged into the sea.
The deal with Malaysia was agreed in principle in December, and the firm has already deployed a search vessel to the target zone 1,200 miles off the coast of Perth, Australia, to capitalise on better conditions before winter arrives in the southern hemisphere.
The vessel – a state-of-the art, 250-foot-long ship called Armada 78 06 – is operated via a satellite link from Ocean Infinity's control centre in Southampton.
Equipped with 3D-imagers, sonars, lasers and cameras, it can spend up to four days submerged, and descend to 6km below the surface.
Anthony Loke Siew Fook, Malaysia's transport minister, said in a statement announcing the new contract that his government 'is committed to continuing the search operation and providing closure for the families of the MH370 passengers'.