Exactly what happened to flight MH370 is one of aviation’s greatest ever mysteries and has captivated imaginations for a decade – but a new search has sparked new hope
The families of passengers on board missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 have been given fresh hope of answers after a new search was launched by a British marine robotics firm.
State-of-the-art underwater robots will scour the seabed for the wreck of the lost Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, which disappeared 11 years ago with 239 passengers on board, baffling investigators and aviation experts.
A renewed search by Southampton-based Ocean Infinity was launched earlier this year but was called off in April due to bad weather. But it resumed on Tuesday as part of a “no find, no fee” agreement with the Malaysian government.
Investigator Charitha Pattiaratchi, professor of oceanography at the University of Western Australia, told the Times: “With the new technology and the way that they are looking at it, there’s a very good chance they will find it.”
The plane vanished from air traffic radar just 40 minutes after taking off from Kuala Lumpur in March 2014, sparking a wave of theories from amateur sleuths. It inexplicably reversed course on what should have been a six-hour, overnight flight northeast to Beijing.
After its final transmission to air traffic controllers, it flew south for at least six hours before plummeting into the Indian Ocean with its fuel exhausted.
Despite the most extensive searches in history, only a few fragments of wreckage have ever been found and its last resting place remains unknown 11 years on.
Jiang Hui, whose mother was a passenger on the doomed flight, said: “I hope the truth will come out soon – the wait has been such a torment for the families.
“We hope the search on reward can be changed into an open and long-term one, with no fixed end date. The families would be willing to participate in such a reward search.”
Oliver Plunkett, chief executive of Ocean Infinity, told relatives of those lost it has been “his life’s ambition” to find the plane when a major search began earlier this year, before the operation was called off after 22 days.
The firm have previously been part of unsuccessful international hunts for the jet, but Prof Pattiaratchi said: “This time, they’re using their own ships that they have been built to design to do this type of work from scratch.”
The explorers will use underwater drones equipped with sophisticated sonar to scour an initial area of 15,000 sq km of seabed, possibly leading up to 38,000 sq km.
The orange robots, which look like large torpedoes, will bounce sound pulses and use laser scans to draw a 3D map of their surroundings.
The vehicles are reportedly able to operate at depths of nearly four miles and can keep going for up to 72 hours before they need to be retrieved. Each one can cover up to 42 square miles a day.
The drones will be launched from one of the company’s fleet of Armada vessels, which are able to process data recovered from the ocean floor.
Ocean Infinity will collect a reward worth £56 million from the Malaysian government if it finds MH370, but nothing if it fails.
The company helped to find Ernest Shackleton’s lost ship Endurance in 2022, It also helped the American adventurer Blaine Gibson and others to directly recover pieces of debris which have been confirmed to be from MH370.
The plane itself has never been found around 50 pieces of wreckage discovered, including the right wing flaperon which washed up on a beach in Reunion Island, a French island in the Indian Ocean, in July 2015.
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