Twelve years after Malaysia Airlines FLights (MH370) vanished with around 239 people on board, a renewed Indian Ocean search is set to resume, using advanced underwater drones and refined data.
About 12 years ago, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished with over 239 people on board. After 12 years, the search for the Boeing 777’s wreckage was scheduled to resume Tuesday in the Indian Ocean.
MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur after midnight on March 8, 2014. It was just a regular routine flight, roughly about six-hours north to Beijing.
About 40 minutes later, the aircraft’s transponder switched off, which dismantled some parts of the airline and disappeared from civilian air traffic control monitors. The military radar picked up the plane turning sharply West, over the Malay Peninsula and out over the third largest body of water in the world, the vast Indian Ocean.
The initial search for the aircraft covered more than 46,000 square miles off the coast of western Australia.
What followed was the most ambitious and costly search in aviation history, as multinational teams combed more than more than 46,000 square miles (120,000 square kilometers) of seabed off Western Australia with ships, aircraft and sonar.
But using drift analysis, incorporating data on the history of ocean currents and winds, the people in charge of the search have now narrowed down the area of highest probability for success to around 5,800 square miles.
British-American deep sea robotics company Ocean Infinity has not revealed the location of the new search, but it hopes to finally solve the tragic mystery by deploying a fleet of the world’s most advanced underwater drones in the sea level.
The autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) can also use ultrasound imaging to peer beneath seafloor sediment that’s built up over the years.
So far, no remains of the aircraft’s crew or passengers — who came from 14 countries including China, Australia, France, the United States, Ukraine and Russia — have been found.
Malaysia’s government agreed to pay Ocean Infinity $70 million, but it has been labelled a “no-find, no fee” contract, meaning the company only gets paid if it finds the missing plane.
Given the huge amount of money invested in the search effort, $70 million wouldn’t actually be a massive payout, but Ocean Infinity would also be able to boast solving one of the world’s biggest aviation mysteries since American aviator Amelia Earhart vanished in 1937 somewhere over the central Pacific Ocean.
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