The third attempt to search for the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was restarted this Tuesday (30), more than ten years after the disappearance of the aircraft with 239 people on board, as reported by the British newspaper The Guardian.
Ocean Infinity, a company specializing in maritime robotic technology, will conduct the new ocean search operation, departing from Perth, Australia. The initiative began at the beginning of this year and lasted 22 days, but was interrupted in April due to unfavorable weather conditions.
According to the Malaysian Ministry of Transport, seabed investigations will take place intermittently for 55 days, using submarines, deep-sea drones and advanced scanning technology, in a region of around 15,000 km² in the Indian Ocean, considered the most likely to locate the aircraft fragments.
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The agreement signed between Ocean Infinity and the Malaysian government provides for the payment of US$70 million, but only if the company locates wreckage, according to the The Guardian.
Flight MH370, which operated on a Boeing 777, disappeared on March 8, 2014, during a flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing. There were 12 crew members and 227 passengers on board, most of them Chinese, as well as citizens from several countries, including Malaysia, Australia, Indonesia, India, France, the United States, among others.
To this day, the disappearance of MH370 remains one of the biggest enigmas in world aviation. Previous searches, led by Australia in partnership with Malaysia and China, covered a vast area of seabed but were ended in 2017 without success. In 2018, Ocean Infinity made another search attempt, also without results.
Fragments confirmed as belonging to the plane were found on islands in the Indian Ocean and on the African coast, helping to delimit the search areas, but the exact whereabouts of the aircraft are still unknown.
An official Malaysian investigation concluded that the plane was manually diverted during flight, without ruling out the possibility of illegal interference by third parties, but rejected theories of pilot suicide or mechanical failure.
The resumption of the searches was celebrated by the families of the victims, according to The Guardian, who spoke to Danica Weeks, wife of an Australian passenger. According to her, the family “never stopped wanting answers” and hopes that this new stage will bring “clarity and tranquility” after years of uncertainty.
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The Beijing court orders Malaysia Airlines to pay compensation to the families of passengers missing on flight MH370. The Chinese court ordered the airline to pay 2.9 million yuan (approximately R$2.24 million at current exchange rates) to each of the families of eight passengers, including compensation for death, funeral expenses and moral damages.
Although the whereabouts of the passengers are still unknown, they were declared legally dead.
The court said another 23 cases were still pending, while in 47 cases the families reached settlements with Malaysia Airlines and withdrew their lawsuits.
