The Malaysian government has agreed “in principle” to resume the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, some ten years after the aircraft vanished.
The 777 disappeared on March 8, 2014, while on a routine service between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board.
The Malaysian government has now accepted a proposal from US based marine robotics company Ocean Infinity to proceed with seabed search operations to locate the wreckage of flight MH370, in a new area estimated at 15,000 square kilometres in the southern Indian Ocean.
On December 20, 2024, Malaysia's transport minister Anthony Loke said the cabinet approved in principle a $70 million deal with the marine robotics company in order to help locate the aircraft.
This is Ocean Infinity's second search for MH370, following an initial mission in 2018, which concentrated on an area identified by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau. The proposed new search area, this time identified by Ocean Infinity, is based on the latest information and data conducted by experts and researchers.
Under a “no find, no fee” agreement, the Malaysian government will not be required to pay Ocean Infinity unless the wreckage of the aircraft is discovered.
In 2015, French investigators at the French aeronautical research laboratory near Toulouse formally identified a flaperon that washed-up on a remote island in the Indian Ocean as part of MH370 which disappeared more than a year earlier.
The Paris prosecutor's office confirmed that investigators used maintenance records to match a serial number found on the wing part with the missing aircraft. "Today it is possible to state with certainty that the flaperon discovered on Reunion on July 29, 2015, corresponds to that of Flight MH370," read the prosecutor's statement.
A year later in 2016, a section of an outboard wing flap found on Pemba Island in Tanzania was also confirmed to be part of the missing MH370.
Malaysia, Australia and China have all conducted joint searches within a 120,000 square kilometre area of the southern Indian Ocean, based on data of automatic connections between an Inmarsat satellite and the plane.
The new search will be the first major effort to locate the plane since the conclusion of a joint investigation report in 2018, which outlined that the plane was “manually turned around in the air” and was not under the control of autopilot.