MH370 hunt BACK ON: 'No find, no fee' | World Defense

MH370 hunt BACK ON: 'No find, no fee'

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MH370 hunt BACK ON: 'No find, no fee' team launches chartered ship to new 'crash site'
A SPECIALIST team of underwater investigators has set off to resume the search for missing Flight MH370 almost four years after it vanished from radar screens and 12 months after previous attempts to find it were scrapped.

By Simon Osborne
Jan 03, 2018


The Malaysian government has enlisted US seabed exploration company Ocean Infinity to spearhead the new operation to locate the wreckage of the Boeing 777 on a "no find, no fee" basis.

The company's chartered Norwegian ship Seabed Constructor is heading for a search zone off the coast of Perth, Western Australia, after setting sail from Port Durban in South Africa last night. It us due to arrive on February 7.

The high-tech vessel is carrying several autonomous submarines which can be launched from the boat to scour the seabed for fragments of the jet.

The Malaysia Airlines passenger jet was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board when it disappeared on March 8 2014.

Seabed-Constructor-899532.jpg

Specialist underwater investigators will lead the search from high-tech ship Seabed Constructor

Its disappearance remains one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history and sparked the airline industry’s biggest ever search operation costing almost £200m.

The Australian-led search for the plane was suspended in January 2017, much to the anguish of distraught relatives.

Australian Transport Safety Bureau chiefs released findings from international and CSIRO scientists that identified a smaller 25,000sq km area with “a high probability” that it contained the aircraft.

Ocean Infinity, which entered into the “no find, no fee” arrangement with Malaysia in October 2017, will focus its search on that part of the ocean floor.

Australia will provide technical assistance at the request of the Malaysian government.

Two Australian women who lost their husbands in the crash had earlier said they were excited to hear the search might resume.

Melbourne woman Jennifer Chong, whose husband and the father of her two sons, Chong Ling Tan, was on the flight, said she and other relatives had been working for the search to be restarted.

Mother of two Danica Weeks, who lost her husband Paul on the plane, said she was initially physically shaking with joy and felt a “weight lifted” when she read the search might resume.

The women are separately suing the airline as a result of the deaths of their husbands.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/worl...es-ocean-infinity-seabed-constructor-perth-wa
 

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SYDNEY/KUALA LUMPUR: A U.S.-based company has begun searching for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, Malaysia said on Tuesday, as it tries to solve one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries.

Flight MH370 disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014 with 239 people, mostly Chinese, on board.

Investigators believe someone may have deliberately switched off MH370's transponder before diverting it over the Indian Ocean. Debris has been collected from Indian Ocean islands and Africa's east coast and at least three pieces have been confirmed as coming from the missing plane.

Australia, China and Malaysia ended a fruitless AUS$200-million (£114.27 million) search of a 120,000 sq km area in January last year, despite investigators urging the search be extended to a 25,000 sq km area further to the north.

Malaysia agreed earlier this month to pay U.S. firm Ocean Infinity up to US$70 million (£50.18 million) if it finds the plane within 90 days. The search vessel, the Seabed Constructor, set off from Durban, South Africa, on Jan. 3.

Ocean Infinity's vessel carries eight "autonomous underwater vehicles", or submersible craft, that will scour the seabed with scanning equipment for information to be sent back for analysis.

The Seabed Constructor began its search on Monday, Malaysia's Department of Civil Aviation said in a statement.

Reuters shipping data shows the vessel reached the search zone on Sunday and on Tuesday was tracking towards a spot that Australia's scientific agency believes with "unprecedented precision and certainty" is the most likely location of the aircraft.

The eight submersibles can search a wide area of sea floor much faster than the tethered scanners used in previous searches, Charitha Pattiaratchi, professor of coastal oceanography at the University of Western Australia, told Reuters by phone from Colombo.

"If they don't find anything in the 90 days ... I think that would be the end for decades - this is like the final effort, if you like," he said.


The Seabed Constructor could complete the search within three or four weeks, covering up to 60,000 sq km in 90 days, or four times faster than earlier efforts, Ocean Infinity Chief Executive Oliver Plunkett told Reuters this month.

(Reporting by Tom Westbrook in SYDNEY, A. Ananthalakshmi and Joseph Sipalan in KUALA LUMPUR; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Source: Reuters/zl
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/new...d-mh370-arrives-in-search-zone-report-9887328
 

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