Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished without a trace in March 2014. Since then, people around the world have been trying to work out where exactly it went, with some people calling it the greatest aviation mystery of all time. But there has been nothing. Now, more than a decade later, Ocean Infinity has resumed its search for the missing plane in the southern Indian Ocean, although some aviation experts think the new search may be a waste of time.
The Boeing 777 plane disappeared during an overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and the 239 people onboard vanished with it. No distress calls were ever made from the flight. Even more mysteriously, no wreckage was found at the time, although a few pieces of the plane did later wash up. All searches for the plane & its passengers were relatively fruitless.
Ocean-exploration company Ocean Infinity is carrying out the new search for the plane, and it’s working under an agreement with the Malaysian government. They have a “no find, no fee” policy, which means the company will only be paid if they find the aircraft. The goal is to find the main wreckage of the aircraft. However, as with previous searches, the biggest challenge comes from knowing exactly where to look & how to search.
The news first broke about the resumed search in late 2024. Anthony Loke, Malaysia’s Transport Minister, confirmed that the search would focus on an area of the southern Indian Ocean where investigators believe has the highest probability of success. Ocean Infinity previously tried searching for the aircraft in 2018 by using autonomous underwater vehicles. That mission was unsuccessful. Other searches took place between 2014 & 2017, covering around 120,000 square kilometers. These searches were a combined effort between Australia, Malaysia, and China, yet they also produced no results.
The area that they’re looking at is roughly the same one that investigators looked at before. They’re relying on satellite handshake data that came from the plane after it stopped communicating with air traffic control. This data produced something known as the “seventh arc.” It’s a curved line across the southern Indian Ocean that represents the aircraft’s last possible position before running out of fuel.
Australia’s Transport Safety Bureau published its own report on the arc, explaining that the aircraft was likely on autopilot & flying south. It claims that the plane was running critically low on fuel when it reached the final arc. What makes the search in this area so difficult, however, is the fact that the seabed beneath it is so rugged & uneven. It has numerous deep trenches. These make it harder for sonar to scan the area to find any possible traces of the plane.
Pieces of the plane have washed up on Réunion Island & Mozambique, as well as Tanzania, and the Malaysian authorities confirmed that these pieces came from MH370. But they weren’t able to point to a single crash site.
So why are researchers unhappy? It comes mostly from the fact that researchers disagree about whether the remaining data could actually help to narrow the search area any further. Simon Maskell, a professor at the University of Liverpool, detailed how underwater searches may miss wreckage when it’s obstructed by terrain. Coverage gaps also cause issues.
Maskell also looked into weak signal propagation studies during the search for MH370. There may be some promise in such an approach, although the reliability of historical data is a little questionable.
However, no matter how hard searchers try, it doesn’t change the underlying odds. There’s no guarantee that the aircraft is even in the area where they’re looking. The search may still end without results if it’s outside that area, even though the underwater vehicles may be capable of finding it. Sonar resolution scanners depend quite a lot on factors like altitude & seabed shape. They also depend on object orientation. It’s possible for even the largest of aircraft wreckage to blend into rough terrain, and negative results of the scans don’t necessarily mean it’s clear.
It’s also not as simple as finding additional debris. Sure, finding more parts of the plane would be helpful, but Malaysia’s official safety report clearly states that finding the main wreckage is the only way of confirming details of the flight path & system behavior. Only with the main wreckage could we start to understand the plane’s final moments.
Some of the most helpful items to find would be the flight data recorders. But considering how long it’s been since the flight disappeared, the chances of being able to recover the data on them are quite low. They’d also require careful handling & forensic analysis.
Until that happens, the disappearance remains officially unsolved.
