MH370 missing 11 years ago has new clues, mystery solved?

Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke said on Tuesday that marine exploration company Ocean Infinity has resumed the search for missing flight MH370 in the hope that the world's greatest aviation mystery will be solved.

Mr Loke told reporters that the contract details between Malaysia and the company were still being finalised but welcomed Ocean Infinity's "proactivity in deploying their vessels" to begin searching for the plane that went missing in March 2014.

He said details of how long the search would take had yet to be negotiated. He also gave no details of when exactly the British company would restart the search.

MH370 disappeared from radar shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur airport in March 2014. The plane was en route to Beijing, carrying 12 crew and 227 passengers. The plane has never been found and the reason for its disappearance remains unknown.

"We are very relieved and happy that the search has resumed after a long hiatus," Grace Nathan, 36, a Malaysian who lost her mother on the ill-fated plane, told AFP.

Jaquita Gonzales, 62, wife of MH370 flight supervisor Patrick Gomes, said she hoped reopening the search would bring some closure to her family. "We just want to know where it is and what happened," she said. "The memories come flooding back like it was yesterday, it's so fresh in our minds."

The ship tracking website Marinetraffic.com shows the Ocean Infinity in the southern Indian Ocean as of February 23.

Malaysia has agreed to resume the search in December 2024, with Ocean Infinity conducting the search on a “no find, no fee” basis. Loke said the government would sign an 18-month contract, in return for which Ocean Infinity would receive $70 million if the wreckage was located and verified. The search would cover 15,000 square kilometres, Loke said.

On March 8, 2024, exactly 10 years after the disappearance, Australia asked the Malaysian government to help with the search. There were eight Australians on board. But on Tuesday, an Australian Transport Safety Bureau spokesman said Australian authorities were not involved in the search.

Flight MH370, a B777-200, departed Kuala Lumpur at 12:41 a.m. local time on March 8, 2014, bound for Beijing. The plane was last seen on military radar at 2:14 a.m., heading west over the Strait of Malacca. Half an hour later, the airline announced it had lost contact with the plane, which was scheduled to land at its destination at around 6:30 a.m.

Families of those on board are still waiting for answers about what happened to their loved ones. Some traveled to Madagascar in 2016 to search for debris on the beaches there: pieces of the plane have been found off the coasts of Tanzania and Mozambique.

In January 2017, after nearly three years of searching 120,000 square kilometres of the southern Indian Ocean, Australian authorities ended their underwater hunt for the wreck. On October 3 of that year, Australian investigators released their final report into the disappearance, saying the fruitless search was a tragedy of magnitude and almost unimaginable in modern times and a source of grief for the family.

Theories about what happened range from a "rogue" pilot to sabotage and conspiracies that the flight was shot down or "disappeared" by a nefarious government agency and landed in an obscure location, possibly with sensitive cargo or a politically important passenger.

Data collected from a homemade flight simulator owned by pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah shows that someone plotted a flight path to the southern Indian Ocean.

Ocean Infinity, based in the UK and US, launched an unsuccessful hunt in 2018.

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