Malaysia’s Transport Minister Anthony Loke pledged on Sunday to try to restart the search for MH370, the Malaysia Airlines flight whose disappearance with 239 people on board marks ten years this Friday, March 8.
“I will do everything possible to obtain evidence and sign a new contract with Ocean Infinity, the underwater exploration firm, so the search can resume as soon as possible,” the Malaysian transport minister stated during a ceremony with victims’ families on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, according to the state news agency Bermana.
At the event, Loke said he would attempt to persuade the rest of the government to recommence the search, a long-standing demand from the families since the last effort was suspended in 2018.
The minister told about 200 relatives of the victims that he had invited the American company Ocean Infinity, a robotics firm specialized in deep-sea exploration, to submit a proposal.
The MH370 flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing disappeared 40 minutes after taking off, just after leaving Malaysia’s airspace and entering Vietnamese airspace when someone in the cabin manually switched off the communications system and the transponder signal was lost.
Shortly afterward, the aircraft, a Boeing 777, changed course manually rather than by automatic flight control, with a sharp left turn back toward the southwest over the Malay Peninsula, then veering again before leaving the radar coverage area.
According to the official investigation, the plane flew approximately six more hours into the Indian Ocean before supposedly running out of fuel and crashing into the sea.
The British communications satellite Inmarsat, positioned over the Indian Ocean, intermittently detected signals from MH370 up to an alleged crash point nearly 2,000 kilometers west of the Australian city of Perth.
Investigators considered the possibility of a terrorist act or a passenger or crew member suicide, but no evidence supported those hypotheses.
The available evidence to date includes 27 fragments recovered from beaches in Reunion, Mozambique, Mauritius, South Africa, and the island of Pemba (Zanzibar), with only three believed to belong to the aircraft with certainty.