The Malaysian government announced this Friday (20) the resumption of searches for the wreckage of the aircraft from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which took off from the capital Kuala Lumpur towards Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board. , and disappeared mysteriously.
The search operations for the plane, a Boeing 777, were considered the most important in the history of aviation – yet the aircraft was never located. The resumption was proposed by the company Ocean Infinity, specialized in marine robotics, which intends to cover an area of 15 thousand square kilometers (the equivalent of ten times the area of the city of São Paulo) in the south of the Indian Ocean.
“Ocean Infinity’s proposal for a search operation is sound and deserves consideration,” said Anthony Loke, Malaysia’s Transport Minister. The company, which has teams in Texas and England, found the Argentine submarine San Juan, which disappeared in the Atlantic, in 2018, and the French submarine Minerve, which disappeared in the 1960s, in 2019.
The search is expected to begin in early 2025, after the finalization and signing of the 18-month contract between the Ministry of Transport and Ocean Infinity, according to Loke. “We have been advised that the ideal time to search designated waters is between January and April. We are working to finalize the agreement as quickly as possible.”
The Malaysian government already used Ocean Infinity in the search for the Boeing 777 in 2018. Unsuccessful, the underwater operation passed through Malaysia, Australia and China, covering an area of 120 thousand square kilometers in the southern Indian Ocean, and cost US$70 million (today, around R$430 million).
This time, the same amount is promised only if a sufficient amount of aircraft debris is found – if this does not happen, the company will not receive payment, according to the minister. “The new search area proposed by Ocean Infinity is based on the latest information and data analysis carried out by experts and researchers”, he states.
Since the disappearance, some wreckage from the plane has washed up along the coast of Africa and on islands in the Indian Ocean. The disappearance has always been the subject of theories, especially that it was an act planned by pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53 years old at the time.
A 495-page report into the 2018 disappearance said the Boeing 777’s controls may have been deliberately manipulated to go off course, but investigators could not determine who was responsible and did not reach a conclusion about what happened, saying that depends on recovering more debris.
