Hunt for MH370 could resume, five years after plane vanished
Malaysia’s transport minister has said the government is open to new proposals to resume the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, as families of passengers commemorated the fifth anniversary of the jet’s disappearance.
The plane vanished with 239 people on board on 8 March, 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Confirmed debris that washed ashore in the western Indian Ocean helped narrow the search area where US technology firm Ocean Infinity focused, but it failed to uncover any evidence.
The head of Ocean Infinity, which mounted a fruitless search for the plane in the southern Indian Ocean in January 2018, said in a video shown at the public remembrance event at a mall near Kuala Lumpur that the company hopes to resume the hunt with better technology it obtained in the past year.
The Ocean Infinity mission came a year after an official search by Malaysia, Australia and China ended in futility.
The company’s CEO, Oliver Plunkett, said they now had better technology after successfully locating an Argentinian submarine in November, a year after it went missing.
“We haven’t given up hope… We hope we can continue the search in due course,” Mr Plunkett said.
Transport minister Anthony Loke said it had been frustrating that the two searches failed to produce any clues and that he “welcomes credible leads and also concrete proposals to resume the search”.
He told reporters the government is “waiting for specific proposals, in particular from Ocean Infinity”.
A Malaysian-led independent investigation report into the flight’s disappearance released last July raised the possibility of “intervention by a third party”. Investigators, however, said the cause of the disappearance cannot be determined until the wreckage and the plane’s black boxes are found.
Voice 370, a support group for next-of-kin, expressed hope that the new government that won a general election in May last year will do more to encourage search missions and seek new clues.
The group’s spokeswoman, Grace Nathan, urged the government to set aside up to $70 million – the amount it agreed to pay Ocean Infinity had it found the plane – to encourage exploration companies to take on “no cure, no fee” missions so that Flight 370’s passengers will not have died in vain.
“It is a wound that cannot heal” if there is no closure, Ms Nathan said.
Two of three pieces of debris confirmedtobefromtheplane were on public display for the first time at the remembrance event, where family members lit candles and sang songs in tribute to their loved ones.
Relatives and supporters wore light blue T-shirts that read: “It’s not history, it’s the future. Fly safely.”