New search for MH370 starts next week

The hunt for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is back on and due to start next week.

Oliver Plunkett is leading next week’s search for MH370.

The hunt for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is back on and due to start next week, with the head of the underwater survey company conducting it saying it has “a realistic prospect of finding it”.

Ocean Infinity chief executive Oliver Plunkett said the ship Seabed Constructor was expected to be in the search zone in the southern Indian Ocean next Wednesday.

“It will launch almost ­instantly,” Mr Plunkett said, referring to the eight autonomous underwater vehicles, or torpedo-like unmanned mini-submarines with side-scan sonar that Ocean Infinity will simultaneously use to try to find wreckage of the Boeing 777 at great depths.

On the way from its last port of call in Durban, South Africa, Mr Plunkett said the crew and scientists had conducted some trial dives of the AUVs.

“We have had some pretty good results, as far as I can tell, a dive down to 5800m, which is pretty cool,’’ he said.

Mr Plunkett said the search would first concentrate on areas identified by Australian authorities and scientists as the most likely based on their “ghost flight” and “death dive” theory that the plane’s pilots were incapacitated and the plane crashed after fuel exhaustion.

But if it is not found there, Mr Plunkett said, it was possible to divert the Seabed Constructor to another target zone preferred by international airline captains Byron Bailey and Simon Hardy, who believe a rogue pilot ­hijacked his own aircraft and flew it to the end, ditching it.

“I think assuming all of the aviation analysis is right, t hen I think we have a realistic prospect of finding it,” Mr Plunkett said.

MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, on a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to ­Beijing with 239 people on board, mainly Chinese nationals.

A two-year, $200 million search led by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau at the request of Malaysia failed to find a trace of the plane in a 120,000sq km search zone, and that survey ended a year ago.

Ocean Infinity, a Houston- based ocean survey outfit owned by several British investors, made an offer to the Malaysian government late last year that it would launch a new search on a “no find, no fee” basis.