The Malaysian government on Saturday said that it has approved a new attempt by a private company to find the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, nearly four years after its disappearance sparked one of aviation’s biggest mysteries.
The Houston, Texas-based company Ocean Infinity this past week dispatched a search vessel to look in the southern Indian Ocean for debris from the plane, which disappeared on March 8, 2014, on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 227 passengers and 12 crew members.
The governments of Malaysia, China and Australia called off the nearly three-year official search in January year. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s (ATSB) final report on the search conceded that authorities were no closer to knowing the reasons for the Boeing 777’s disappearance, or its exact location.
“The basis of the offer from Ocean Infinity is based on ‘no cure, no fee,’” Malaysian Minister of Transport Liow Tiong Lai said. “That means they are willing to search the area of 25,000 square kilometers pointed out by the expert group near the Australian waters.”
However, “I don’t want to give too much hope ... to the [next of kin],” he added.
Ocean Infinity said in a statement that the search vessel Seabed Constructor, which left the South African port of Durban on Tuesday, was taking advantage of favorable weather to move toward “the vicinity of the possible search zone.”
In the initial search for the plane, a 52-day surface search covered an area of several million square kilometers in the Indian Ocean west of Australia, before an underwater search mapped 710,000 square kilometers of seabed at depths of up to 6km. They were the largest aviation searches of their kind in history, according to the ATSB.
Despite other methods such as studying satellite imagery and investigating ocean drifts after debris from the plane washed ashore on islands in the eastern Indian Ocean and the east coast of Africa, the 1,046-day search was called off on Jan. 17 last year.
However, the ATSB’s report said the understanding of where the plane could be is “better now than it has ever been,” partly as a result of studying debris that washed ashore in 2015 and 2016 that showed the plane was “not configured for a ditching at the end-of-flight,” meaning it had run out of fuel.
The search team also looked back at satellite imagery that showed objects in the ocean that might have been MH370 debris.
The report said this analysis complemented work detailed in a 2016 review and identified an area of less than 25,000 square kilometers — roughly the size of the US state of Vermont — that “has the highest likelihood of containing MH370.”
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion