Nearly 12 years after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished over the Indian Ocean, a new search for the aircraft has begun. Using state-of-the-art underwater drones, US-based marine robotics company Ocean Infinity is leading an expedition to scour 5,800 sq miles of seabed.

MH370 departed from Kuala Lumpur on 8 March 2014 with 239 people on board but, 40 minutes into what should have been a six-hour flight to Beijing, the Boeing 777 vanished from civilian radar. Subsequent military radar data showed it veering thousands of miles off course, heading towards the southern Indian Ocean. An extensive international search effort failed to find wreckage or bodies.

This “renewed quest to find the doomed airliner” could “potentially solve the world’s greatest aviation mystery”, said Bernard Lagan in The Times. While parts of the search area have been searched before, Ocean Infinity’s new drones are better equipped to explore the “rugged undersea mountains and canyons” that could not previously be accessed.

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“With the new technology and the way that they are looking at it, there’s a very good chance they will find it,” Charitha Pattiaratchi, a professor of oceanography at the University of Western Australia, told the paper.

The company, which is working on a “no find, no fee” basis for the Malaysian government, has “autonomous underwater vehicles” that can dive to nearly 19,700ft and operate for days without surfacing, said Sujita Sinha on Interesting Engineering. Using side sonar, ultrasound imaging and magnetometers, they can produce detailed 3D maps of the seabed and detect metallic objects buried under sediment, before remotely operated vehicles are “sent down for closer inspection”.

The “on-off search” for MH370 has “already become the most expensive hunt in aviation history”, said Ben Farmer in The Telegraph. Yet after more than a decade, it has “little to show for it”. Earlier investigations were conducted “in a blaze of publicity”, but this latest effort has been comparatively “low-key”.

Ocean Infinity, which helped locate Ernest Shackleton’s lost ship, Endurance, in 2022, has already led an unsuccessful hunt for MH370 in 2018. It started searching again in February of this year but had to stop due to the weather. The current search area has been identified using updated satellite analysis, refined drift modelling and expert input.

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What next?

Ocean Infinity is scheduled to search for 55 days, looking for large pieces of debris such as engines and other heavy components of the aircraft. It reportedly stands to earn $70 million (£52 million), if significant wreckage is found.

Relatives of the MH370 passengers – from China, Australia and Europe – have long fought to “keep the hunt alive”, and are watching the new developments closely, said Iman Muttaqin Yusof in the South China Morning Post. They argue “that closure matters not only for the dead but for global aviation safety”.