Search to resume for missing Flight MH370
A search will resume this month for the Malaysia Airlines plane that vanished more than 10 years ago with 239 people on board.
In what is considered one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries, Flight MH370 went missing on March 8, 2014, while en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.
Six Australian citizens and one New Zealand resident of Western Australia were among the 227 passengers on board the Boeing 777, which was also carrying 12 crew members.
Malaysia’s transport ministry announced on Wednesday that a deep-sea search for wreckage from the plane will resume on December 30, after an earlier search in the southern Indian Ocean in April had to be suspended due to poor weather conditions.
Seabed exploration firm Ocean Infinity, which conducted an unsuccessful search in 2018, confirmed it would conduct the new seabed search operations over 55 days.
In March, Malaysia agreed to terms and conditions of an agreement with Ocean Infinity to search for MH370 in a location estimated to cover 15,000 square kilometres in the southern Indian Ocean.
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Malaysia will pay the firm $US70 million ($A107 million) if substantive wreckage is found during the search on the seabed.
Previous searches are said to have cost more then $200 million, but Malaysian transport minister Anthony Loke said last year that his government “is steadfast in our resolve to locate MH370”.
The ministry said in a statement about the latest search that it remains committed to “providing closure to the families affected by the tragedy”.
Ocean Infinity – which uses autonomous underwater vehicles equipped with advanced sonar technology – has located underwater wreckage in the past, including from a missing Argentinian navy submarine nearly 1000 metres underwater in the Atlantic Ocean, and the wreck of a US Navy ship that had been underwater for 78 years.
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Since the MH370’s disappearance, debris confirmed to be from the aircraft has washed up as far as the coast of Africa and on islands throughout the Indian Ocean.
Flight MH370 disappeared from radar screens after last communicating with air traffic control 38 minutes after take-off. Military radar systems tracked the plane heading off course before it disappeared between Thailand and Indonesia, over the Andaman Sea.
A 495-page report into the disappearance in 2018 said the Boeing 777’s controls were likely deliberately manipulated to go off course, but investigators could not determine who was responsible and stopped short of offering a conclusion on what happened, saying that depended on finding the wreckage.
Investigators have said there was nothing suspicious in the background, financial affairs, training and mental health of both the captain and co-pilot.
More than 150 Chinese passengers were on the flight. Others included 50 Malaysians as well as citizens of France, Australia, Indonesia, India, the United States, Ukraine and Canada, among others.
It was the deadliest incident in Malaysia Airlines history — surpassed four months later when a flight was shot down over Ukraine — and remains the deadliest involving a Boeing 777.
The mystery of what happened to the missing plane continues to captivate people and has sparked many theories over the past 11 years, some of which were shared in a 2023 Netflix docu-series titled MH370: The Plane That Disappeared.
–with AAP
