Eleven years after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, a new search for the aircraft and the 239 souls it carried has been announced. Armed with new information on where its crash site might be, the search expedition may not only unravel the mystery of how the plane vanished, but also finally bring closure to the families of the victims of the disaster.
Although Ocean Infinity, the Anglo-American maritime exploration company conducting the new search, does not know how long the expedition will take, they now have the advantage of the results of two studies (you can read them here and here) that have extensively analyzed tracking data from 9M-MRO, the registration number of the lost Boeing 777-200ER, pointing to a narrow stretch of ocean where the lost airliner should be.
The Malaysian government welcomed the new search, and signed an 18-month “no find, no fee” contract with Ocean Infinity in December 2024, with terms similar to what had been agreed to during the original search, including a $70 million reward if the company is able to locate the resting place of MH370. The effort will focus on a 15,000-square kilometer (5,800-square mile) patch of the Indian Ocean, having narrowed the possible crash site down to an area that is a bare fraction of the millions of square miles covered by the original 2017 search.
Flight MH370 mysteriously disappeared on the night of March 8, 2014, en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to its destination of China’s Ho Chi Minh City. The aircraft disappeared from radar over the South China Sea, with ground control stations losing contact with the plane’s transponder signals at 1:21 am. Indonesian military radar last tracked the aircraft on a west-northwest heading headed out over the Indian Ocean, where it disappeared without a trace.
The resulting three-year search for MH370 was the largest in aviation history, and involved an international effort that scoured over 4,600,000 square kilometers (1,800,000 square miles) of the Indian Ocean, and was finally called off in January 2017. A smaller search in 2018 also proved unsuccessful.
On February 25, 2025, Malaysian transport minister Anthony Loke confirmed that Ocean Infinity’s proposed search area was “based on the latest information and data analysis conducted by experts and researchers,” and that “the proposal for a search operation by Ocean Infinity is a solid one and deserves to be considered.”
“They combined all the data and they felt confident that the current search area is more credible,” Loke added. “They (Ocean Infinity) have convinced us that they are ready.”
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This has to be one of the saddest crashes ever. The prevailing view is that the pilot committed suicide in an extreme and dramatic way, taking all those hundreds of people with him.
In the end the plane sailed on and on, a coffin for all aboard, likely including the pilot, until it ran out of fuel and dived toward the water.
I can’t imagine any image more bleak than that.