MH370 Ocean Infinity search ends with no trace of aircraft

The company involved in the second search for the missing Malaysia Airline flight MH370 hopes to renew the hunt one day.

Ocean Infinity launches an autonomous underwater vehicle in the hunt of Malaysia Airlines' flight MH370. Picture: AFP

The second underwater search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has come to an end, finding no trace of the aircraft but with the company involved hopeful of renewing the hunt one day.

Ocean Infinity, the British-owned, Houston-based marine survey company which has been scouring the southern Indian Ocean looking for the aircraft, this afternoon issued a statement saying its current search is ending.

“In accordance with its agreement with the Government of Malaysia, Ocean Infinity has now completed 90 days of survey across the designated search area,” the company said in a statement.

Ocean Infinity began looking in January for the Boeing 777 which disappeared on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board, after deviating from a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

While the radar transponder was turned off and radio contact broken, primary radar and automatic satellite tracking showed the aircraft came down in the southern Indian Ocean.

Ocean Infinity had struck a “no cure, no fee” contract with the Malaysian government in which it would receive up to $US70 million, but only if it found the aircraft.

Ocean Infinity’s leased vessel Seabed Constructor deployed up to eight torpedo-like unmanned mini-submarines known as Autonomous Underwater Vehicles equipped with a variety of sophisticated devices including side-scan radar to survey more than 100,000 sq km of seabed.

The area searched is nearly as great as the first, also unsuccessful search led by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which took two and a half years.

The Ocean Infinity search went progressively north from the northern most point on an arc searched by the ATSB, based on drift modelling by the CSIRO of where parts of the aircraft found washed up on and on islands off the coast of Africa would have originated based on known winds and currents.

“The search area was selected by leading oceanographers based upon drift analysis of the debris from MH370, the only actual evidence that exists,” Ocean Infinity said.

The company’s chief executive, Oliver Plunkett, said “I would firstly like to extend the thoughts of everyone at Ocean Infinity to the families of those who have lost loved ones on MH370.”

“Part of our motivation for renewing the search was to try to provide some answers to those affected,” Mr Plunkett said in the statement.

“It is therefore with a heavy heart that we end our current search without having achieved that aim.”

“Whilst clearly the outcome so far is extremely disappointing, as a company we are truly proud of what we have achieved in terms of both the quality of data we’ve produced and the speed with which we covered such a vast area, the likes of which has not been seen before.

“There simply has not been a subsea search of this scale and we hope that in the future we will be able to again offer our services in the search for MH370.”

The Malaysian government said it would not extend the contract with Ocean Infinity to continue the search at this point, though the new transport minister, Anthony Loke, said when he was appointed that finding MH370 would be one of his top priorities.

An international group of former airline pilots and an engineer has identified a new potential search area of about 4,000 sq km immediately to the southwest of where the first search by the ATSB ended, based on the theory that the aircraft’s captain hijacked his own aircraft and flew it to the end.

In an interview on Sky News this morning, Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack said Australia would not be part of a new search “at this stage.”

“Of course, I suppose it may be that, like a lot of those ships which go down, ultimately they find them and new technologies come on board and new searches are mounted, but it looks as though this will remain a mystery for the time being,” Mr McCormack said.