The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 remains "one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history"—but as NBC News reports, a marine robotics company hopes its latest search for the wreckage will change that. The plane deviated from its planned path and then vanished from radar soon after taking off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8, 2014, with 239 people aboard, and the largest search in aviation history came up empty; all that has been recovered are roughly two dozen pieces of debris that washed ashore in Africa and on Indian Ocean islands. The US-based Ocean Infinity spent months looking for the plane in 2018, but to no avail. Now, Malaysia's transport minister says the company has launched its latest "no find, no fee" search, which was approved in December.
Ocean Infinity believes advances in technology have upped its chances of success, with Transport Minister Anthony Loke saying Tuesday the company is "confident that the current search area is more credible, as they have previously covered a large area and believe this is the area that was missed in past searches. ... They are ready to take the risk and resume the search. That is why the Malaysian government is proceeding with it." Writing for New York Magazine, Jeff Wise reports that Ocean Infinity has in recent years established itself as a "highly capable underwater-survey company," in part by locating the wreckage of a missing Argentine submarine in 2018. It boasts a fleet of eight state-of-the-art, 250-foot-long ships, one of which arrived Sunday in a remote part of the Indian Ocean.
Wise explains that in recent years, researchers have posited that the plane came to rest close to 35 degrees south latitude, in an area that has twice been searched. That area, which measures one-tenth the size of Ocean Infinity's prior search, is where the company and its AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles) are looking; Wise suspects Ocean Infinity could complete its scan in just two weeks. If it manages to find the plane and its black boxes, the mystery of why MH370 crashed may finally be solved. "If not," Wise writes, "it will effectively disprove the analysis underlying the seabed search and suggest that officials bungled some fundamental assumptions."
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Wise continues, "By this point, every point in the ocean where the plane could plausibly have gone will have been searched. One or more of their assumptions must have been wrong. ... This, hopefully, will spur those responsible for finding the plane to acknowledge the failure of the past approach and bring in fresh blood. The case is too important to let go with a shrug and a wave of the hand." The Guardian reports that Ocean Infinity will receive $70 million if it succeeds. (More MH370 stories.)
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