Malaysia has agreed on the terms to resume the search for the wreckage of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 with an ocean exploration firm, its transport minister said on Wednesday.
Flight MH370, a Boeing 777, was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew when it vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in 2014 in one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries.
The decision will enable commencement of seabed search operations in a new location estimated to cover 5,790 sq miles in the southern Indian Ocean, based on a ‘no find, no fee’ principle, minister Loke Siew Fook said.
Exploration firm Ocean Infinity will receive $70 million if the wreckage is successfully located, he said.
‘The government is committed to continuing the search operation and providing closure for the families of the MH370 passengers,’ Loke said in a statement.
The government in December said it had agreed in principle with Ocean Infinity’s proposal to resume the hunt for MH370.
The firm had conducted the last search for the plane that ended in 2018 but failed on two attempts.
Those followed an underwater search by Malaysia, and China in a 120,000 sq km (46,332 sq mile) area of the southern Indian Ocean, based on data of automatic connections between an Inmarsat satellite and the plane.
A ship that will look for the missing plane was deployed to its Indian Ocean search zone late last month, ship tracking data showed, even though a deal had yet to be signed with the government.
It was not immediately clear how long the search contract with Ocean Infinity would be. Loke had previously said it would cover an 18-month period.
It comes after experts warned that the search for MH370 ‘could turn catastrophic very, very quickly.’
Former n naval officer Peter Waring said the technology being used in the search was top of the line.
‘What these new Ocean Infinity vessels represent quite frankly, is as big a transition in maritime technology as the movement from sail to steam in the 1800s,’ he told 60 Minutes.
‘It is a giant leap in, in maritime technology.’
However, the technology can only get searchers so far in the open ocean, where where waves as high as 20 metres have been recorded in the new search area.
‘There’s absolutely no shelter out there and there’s nowhere to hide,’ Mr Waring warned.
‘You’re six or seven days away from the nearest port, which is Perth.
‘These are dangerous conditions, if something goes wrong, it will turn catastrophic very, very quickly.’
This is Ocean Infinity’s second effort to find the wreckage after a failed attempt in 2018.
‘We’ve been here before, there’s been lots of searches in the past,’ Mr Waring said.
‘There’s been lots of promises made and I’m really hoping this time that we find the aircraft and that we can put it all to rest.
‘This is a mystery that really tears at the fabric of reality, and maybe it’ll stitch it back together again slightly.
Deep sea explorer and electrical engineer Craig Wallace also warned the about the gruelling conditions.
‘The Indian Ocean that they’re working in is, is among the worst in the world,’ he said.
‘They’ve recorded wave heights of 20 meters, so 60 feet. It’s extreme conditions and there will be a lot of times where they simply cannot launch or recover the vehicle.’
Ocean Infinity are believed to have identified their search area based on the estimated location of the seventh arc, the aircraft’s performance characteristics and the weather along the flight paths on the night and morning of March 8, 2014.
The recovery experts will also factor in satellite data and oceanographic modelling of the probable travel paths of the 37 salvaged aircraft components which have washed up as far away as Mauritius and Madagascar.
Former RAAF and Qantas pilot Mike Glynn suggested other data relied upon in the investigation was misleading.
He said the methodology, developed by a retired aerospace engineer, relied on anomalies in radio signals measured in what’s known as weak signal propagation reporter tracking.
‘The theory says if you track all links with anomalies in them, you can track where the aircraft went, but you can’t,’ he told the n.
‘These links are tens of thousands of kilometres long and there’s no identification of the aircraft that went through. All you get is an anomaly in the signal which can be caused by a lot of things.’
He said the Malaysian government was hopeful the theory equated to evidence that would bring them closer to the wreckage of MH370.
‘It’s absolutely not and it will lead to another [search] failure,’ Mr Glynn said.
Mr Glynn believes Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah originally planned a mass murder-suicide for the flight.
At the present stage, jurisdiction over found wreckage is unclear.