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21-12-2024
KUALA LUMPUR: The Malaysian government says it has agreed in principle to resume the search for a passenger jet that vanished 10 years ago in one of aviation’s greatest mysteries.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared in March 2014 while on its way to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board.
Efforts to locate the wreckage of the Boeing 777 have sputtered over the years and hundreds of families of those on board remain haunted by the tragedy.
On Friday, Malaysia’s transport minister Anthony Loke said the cabinet approved in principle a $70m (£56m) deal with US-based marine exploration firm Ocean Infinity to find the aircraft.
Under a “no find, no fee” arrangement, Ocean Infinity will get paid only when the wreckage is found.
A 2018 search by Ocean Infinity under similar terms ended unsuccessfully after three months.
A multinational effort that cost $150m ended in 2017 after two years of scouring vast waters.
While the government has “in principle” accepted Ocean Infinity’s offer, Loke said negotiations over specific terms of the deal were still ongoing and would be finalized early next year.
The new search will cover a 15,000 sq km patch in the southern Indian Ocean.
“We hope this time will be positive,” Loke said, adding that finding the wreckage would give closure to the families of those on board.
Flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur in the early hours of 8 March 2014. It lost communication with air traffic control less than an hour after take-off and radar showed that it deviated from its planned flight path.
Investigators generally agree that the plane crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean though it is unclear as to why it happened.
Pieces of debris, believed to be from the plane, have washed up on shores of the Indian Ocean in the years after the disappearance.
A host of conspiracy theories have sprouted around the aircraft’s disappearance, from speculation that the pilot had deliberately brought down the plane to claims that it had been shot down by foreign military.
A 2018 investigation into the aircraft’s disappearance found that the plane’s controls were likely deliberately manipulated to take it off course, but drew no conclusions about who had been behind it. Investigators said at the time that “the answer can only be conclusive if the wreckage is found”.
However, for the last decade, two words have haunted Li Eryou lost contact.
It’s what Malaysia Airlines told him when flight MH370 disappeared, with his son Yanlin on board.
“For years I have been asking what do you mean by ‘lost contact’? It seems to me that if you lose contact with someone, you should be able to reconnect with them,” Li says.
He and his wife, Liu Shuangfeng farmers from a village south of Beijing have struggled to make sense of what has become one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history.
On 8 March 2014, less than an hour into a routine night-time flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, the pilot said goodnight to Malaysian air traffic control. The Boeing 777, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members, was about to cross into Vietnamese air space. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
