Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
AP
—
Malaysia’s Transport Ministry announced Wednesday that a private company will resume the deep sea search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 later this month, more than a decade after it disappeared without a trace.
The search will be carried out by Texas-based marine robotics company Ocean Infinity, which signed a new “no discovery, no fee” contract with the Malaysian government in March.
It is unclear whether the company has obtained any new evidence of the plane’s location. Ocean Infinity CEO Oliver Pankett was reported to have said last year that the company’s technology has improved since 2018, when the company conducted its first undersea search operation under a similar contract and found nothing. Pankett said the company was working with a number of experts to analyze the data and narrow the search to the most likely sites.
Earlier this year, the company resumed its undersea search operations at a new 15,000 square kilometer (5,800 square mile) site in the Indian Ocean with permission from the Malaysian government, but the search was halted in April due to bad weather.
Ocean Infinity will be paid $70 million, but only if the wreckage is found.
The Boeing 777 disappeared from radar on March 8, 2014, shortly after taking off from Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, most of them Chinese. Satellite data shows the plane is believed to have veered off its flight path and headed south toward the far southern Indian Ocean, where it crashed.
Debris washed ashore on the East African coast and on islands in the Indian Ocean, but an expensive multinational search yielded no clues as to its location. Other than those small fragments, no bodies or debris have yet been found.
In a short statement on Wednesday, Malaysia’s Ministry of Transport announced that Ocean Infinity would search intermittently for a total of 55 days from December 30 in the areas considered most likely to find the missing aircraft.
“The latest development underscores the Malaysian government’s commitment to providing closure to the families affected by this tragedy,” it said.
“We appreciate the efforts of the Malaysian side,” Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lin Jian said in Beijing.
Ocean Infinity declined to comment on the raid Wednesday in response to an email from The Associated Press seeking further details.
