Malaysia has resumed the deep-sea search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, more than 11 years after the aircraft disappeared on March 8, 2014, during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The Transport Ministry announced on Wednesday that operations will resume on December 30, raising hopes of a solution to one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries once again.
The Boeing 777 was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members when it disappeared from radar over the Andaman Sea.
Targeted Search Area and ‘No Find, No Fee’ Contract
The new operation will be conducted by the maritime exploration firm Ocean Infinity. This search differs from previous large-scale efforts in being highly focused:
Targeted Area: The ministry said the search would focus on a “targeted area assessed as having the highest probability of locating the aircraft.” No exact coordinates for this new search zone were given.
Duration: The seabed search operations are scheduled to run intermittently over a period of 55 days in total.
Financial Terms: The operation will again be performed on a ‘no find, no fee’ basis. Malaysia will pay Ocean Infinity $70 million only if substantive wreckage of the plane is found.
This is a resumption of an earlier Ocean Infinity search effort that was suspended in April 2025 due to poor weather.
Bringing Closure to Families
Rather, resumption of the search would provide closure to the victims’ next of kin, who have waited over ten years for answers.
“The latest development underscores the government of Malaysia’s commitment to providing closure to the families affected by this tragedy,” said the Transport Ministry in its statement. The mission seeks to definitively determine the fate of the aircraft, and the cause of its disappearance, which investigators have not ruled out as being a deliberate off-course deviation.
The Decade-Old Mystery
The disappearance of MH370 set off one of the costliest and broadest multinational searches ever conducted in the history of aviation, with representatives from Australia, China, the U.S., and the UK.
Initial Discovery: For all the years of searching, no debris was officially confirmed until July 2015, when a flaperon from the plane’s right wing was found on the French island of Réunion.
Subsequent Finds: Pieces of a few other confirmed and suspected debris have since washed ashore along the coast of Africa and on Indian Ocean islands, confirming the plane’s final resting place was the southern Indian Ocean.
However, the main wreckage remains undiscovered. Resuming the search 11 years after the plane vanished instills new hope that the final piece of the mystery—that of the main body’s location—can be determined once and for all.
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