Malaysia has agreed to resume the search for the wreckage of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, Malaysia’s transport minister said on Friday, the 20th of December, more than a decade after the plane disappeared in one of the world’s biggest aviation mysteries, reports Reuters.
Flight MH370, a Boeing 777 with 227 passengers and 12 crew members, disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 8 March 2014.
“We have a duty, a responsibility and an obligation to the next of kin,” Transport Minister Anthony Loke said at a press conference. “We hope that this time it will be positive that the wreckage of the plane will be found and will give the families a closure.”
Flight MH370 last reported about 40 minutes after take-off from Kuala Lumpur. The pilots reported when the plane entered Vietnamese airspace over the Gulf of Thailand and shortly afterwards its transponder was switched off.
Military radar showed that the aircraft deviated from its flight path to fly back over northern Malaysia, then turned into the Andaman Sea and then turned south, after which all contact was lost.
Since then, debris has washed up on the African coast and on islands in the Indian Ocean, some of it confirmed to be aircraft wreckage.
Loke said the proposal to resume the search in the southern Indian Ocean was made by Ocean Infinity, the research company that conducted the last search for the plane, which ended in 2018.
The 495-page 2018 report on the plane’s disappearance said the Boeing 777’s controls were likely deliberately manipulated to make it veer off course, but investigators could not determine who was responsible and declined to draw conclusions about what happened, saying everything would depend on finding the plane’s wreckage.
He said an 18-month contract would be signed with Ocean Infinity and the company would receive 70 million US dollars, but only if the wreckage found was deemed significant, adding that the search would take place on the seabed in a new 15 000 square kilometre area.
More than 150 Chinese passengers were on board. Other passengers included 50 Malaysians, as well as nationals of France, Australia, Indonesia, India, the USA, Ukraine, Canada and other countries.