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A new search is once again getting underway nearly 11 years after Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 vanished into thin air without a trace. Now, more than 4,000 days since the plane with 239 people on board mysteriously disappeared, the British marine robotics and maritime exploration firm Ocean Infinity, in collaboration with the Malaysian government, is going to try one more time to figure out what happened.
This won’t be the first time that Ocean Infinity has searched for the missing Boeing 777, but it might be the last. In 2018, the company found no sign of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, but did say that they hope the data they captured during that search and gathered since then, along with advances in technology, will yield better results this time.
Earlier this week, Ocean Infinity’s deep-water support vessel Armada 7806 – reportedly the most technically advanced ship of its kind – began scouring the Indian Ocean about 1,200 miles off the coast of Perth, Australia. Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke said on Tuesday that Ocean Infinity is “confident that the current search area is more credible, as they have previously covered a large area and believe this is the area that was missed in past searches.”
The Armada 7806 is expected to spend up to six weeks or more searching three or four “hotspots” where researchers have determined to be the most likely locations for the remains of Flight MH370.
One of those locations is focused on an arc in the southern Indian Ocean. This area was chosen based on signals exchanged between the plane and an Inmarsat communications satellite. The second search zone will be located further south based on calculations assuming that the plane flew an additional 100 nautical miles after running out of fuel. The third search area is based on signals captured by ham radio operators using WSPR transmitters. A possible fourth “hotspot” that could be explored, if the weather cooperates, is a location that was suggested by researchers at the University of Western Australia.
Should Ocean Infinity actually find the missing plane, it will not be allowed to raise it without permission from the Malaysian government. However, as Transport Minister Loke pointed out, the discovery of the location of Flight MH370 would certainly be welcomed by “not only for the families, but also for the aviation industry as a whole, because this is the biggest mystery in the history of aviation.”
Over the past 11 years, there has been no shortage of scientists, aviation experts, filmmakers, internet sleuths, and even local fishermen who have studied the disappearance of Flight MH370 and/or put forth numerous theories as to what happened. Hopefully, this latest search effort will finally yield some answers.
Content shared from brobible.com.