MH370 Discovery Now in the Hands of a Private Company

8th Jan 2018

Nearly four years after its mysterious disappearance, the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which went missing on 8^th March, 2014, is still missing. Numerous attempts at locating the Boeing 777, which crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean with 12 crew members and 227 passengers on their way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, China have not yielded any results.

The official search, conducted by the governments of Malaysia, China and Australia officially ended about a year ago in January last year and according to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s report, the investigators were unable to either find the last location of the plane or determine why it disappeared.

The search covered an area of several million km², including an underwater search of 710,000km² and has also included investigation of ocean drifts and satellite imagery study. However, the search had to be called off after more than 1,000 days.

But the Malaysian government is not giving up on finding the aircraft. In an announcement this Saturday, it said that it has hired a private company from US to try and find the MH370.

The company, Ocean Infinity, has employed a search vessel “Seabed Constructor” to search for the wreckage. The vessel departed the port of Durban in South Africa last Tuesday, moving toward the “vicinity of the possible search zone”.

According to Liow Tiong Lai, Minister of Transport in Malaysia, the Houston, Texas-based company agreed to only be paid if they manage to locate the missing plane.

Mr. Liow said:

The basis of the offer from Ocean Infinity is based on ‘no cure, no fee'. That means they are willing to search the area of 25,000 square kilometers (9,653 square miles) pointed out by the expert group near the Australian waters.

The Minister said the government will continue to search, but he doesn’t seem too optimistic of finding the plane as he said:

I don’t want to give too much hope … to the (next of kin).

Several pieces of debris from the plane were found near Madagascar and South Africa in 2015 and 2016, which were later confirmed to be from the MH370.