A family member writes on a message board for passengers, onboard the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. The Boeing 777-200 plane heading from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew went missing on March 8, 2014. Photo / Getty Images
Nearly 12 years after the world’s most baffling aviation riddle began with the disappearance of an airliner and its passengers, seabed explorers are to resume their search for MH370.
State-of-the-art underwater robots will in the coming days begin mapping the abyss of the Indian Ocean, hunting a lost Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 and all 239 on board.
The expedition by a private company called Ocean Infinity is the latest chapter in an on-off search that has already become the most expensive hunt in aviation history, but after more than a decade, has little to show for it.
While previous investigations have been conducted in a blaze of publicity, the latest developments have been comparatively low key, with few disclosures about new information or search areas.
“With the support of the Malaysian Government, we are resuming the search for the missing aircraft MH370,” said a spokesman for the Ocean Infinity.
“Due to the important and sensitive nature of this search, formal communications will come through the Malaysian Government.”
Malaysia has added little more, with its Transport Ministry only saying that there will be an “intermittent” search lasting a total of 55 days “carried out in a targeted area assessed to have the highest probability of locating the aircraft”.
Family groups and underwater search enthusiasts have in recent days been tracking the movements of an 86m multi-purpose offshore vessel called Armada 86 05, which is reported to be leading the search.
The Singapore-flagged vessel, which was only completed earlier this year, has been sailing west from Australia into the Indian Ocean.
Ocean Infinity, a United Kingdom and United States-based marine robotics and survey company, has signed up for the search on a £56 million ($130m) “no find, no fee” basis.
While the company will only get paid if wreckage is found, the prestige of solving the mystery may prove even more valuable for an underwater search firm.
The company was previously best known for helping locate Ernest Shackleton’s lost ship Endurance in 2022.
It has already unsuccessfully tried to find the airliner in 2018, spending three months searching without success over 777,000sqkm of ocean.
The company then began again earlier this year, at a new 15,000sqkm site, before calling off that operation because of bad weather in April after 22 days.
This week’s resumption, due to begin today, will see the company attempt to complete that search.
Ocean Infinity will use Hugin 6000 autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), which can map the ocean floor in 3D at depths of up to 6000m using sonar, laser, optic and echo sound technology.
The orange robots, which resemble 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 6km and can keep going for up to 72 hours before they need to be retrieved. Each one can cover up to 100sqkm a day.
More than a decade of searching has so far turned up almost nothing, except a few small fragments washed ashore along the coast of Africa and on islands in the Indian Ocean.
No bodies or large pieces of wreckage have ever been recovered.
Most passengers were Chinese, but there were also citizens from the US, Indonesia, France, Russia and elsewhere.
Those lost include two young Iranians travelling on stolen passports, a group of Chinese calligraphy artists, 20 employees of US tech firm Freescale Semiconductor, a stunt double for actor Jet Li and several families with young children.
“I hope the truth will come out soon – the wait has been such a torment for the families,” Jiang Hui, whose mother was a passenger on the aircraft, said on social media ahead of the search.
“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.”
The mystery hangs over not only relatives, but the industry as a whole.
Willie Walsh, the former British Airways boss who now leads the International Air Transport Association (IATA), said earlier this month it was “essential that we make whatever effort we can to discover the aircraft and to understand what actually happened”.
“Everybody wants to see that aircraft found and everybody wants to be able to understand what actually happened.
“I am sure all of the families involved will welcome the resumption of the search for the aircraft, as everybody in the industry will, because we all want to know what happened.”
The plane disappeared from air-traffic radar 39 minutes after departing Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8, 2014.
The pilot’s last radio call to Kuala Lumpur – “Good night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero” – was the last communication before the aircraft crossed into Vietnamese airspace and failed to check in with controllers there.
Minutes later, the plane’s transponder, which broadcasts its location, shut down. Military radar showed the jet turn back over the Andaman Sea, and satellite data suggested it continued flying for hours, possibly until it ran out of fuel, before crashing into a remote section of the southern Indian Ocean.
The lack of information and facts has spawned theories ranging from a hijacking to cabin depressurisation or power failure.
There was no distress call, ransom demand, evidence of technical failure or severe weather.
Malaysian investigators in 2018 cleared the passengers and crew, but did not rule out “unlawful interference”. Authorities have said someone deliberately severed communications and diverted the plane.
Australia led a multinational effort, along with Malaysia and China, that ended in January 2017. Australian investigators later said the mystery could not be solved until the aircraft was found and the failure to find it was “almost inconceivable and certainly societally unacceptable”.
The latest search team will have to deal with not only the lack of clarity about where the aircraft went down, but also the rugged ocean floor.
“The ocean floor is a very complicated environment to navigate around,” Simon Maskell, professor of autonomous systems at Liverpool University and a former scientific adviser to Ocean Infinity told the Guardian.
“It’s not just flat. You’ve got huge mountains, ridges and chasms – and you’ve got to look everywhere.
“You can have the greatest technology in the world, but if you look in the wrong place, it’s not going to help you.”
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