Malaysian officials said on Sunday that a US company that tried to find the plane in 2018 has proposed a fresh search in the southern Indian Ocean. This is where the Malaysia Airlines plane is believed to have crashed a decade ago.

At a rememberance event held by members of the missing passengers, Malaysia’s Transport Minister Anthony Loke said he would speak to Texas-based marine robotics firm Ocean Infinity about its latest “no find, no fee” proposal.

“The government is steadfast in our resolve to locate MH370,” Loke told a memorial event marking the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of the jet. “We really hope the search can find the plane and provide truth to the next-of-kin.”

What happened to flight MH370?

The Boeing 777 plane vanished from radar shortly after taking off on 8 March 2014. It was carrying 239 people, mostly Chinese nationals, on a flight from Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Satellite data showed the plane deviated from its flight path to head over the southern Indian Ocean, where it is believed to have crashed.

Previous searches for MH370

A private search in 2018 by Ocean Infinity also found nothing. V.P.R. Nathan, a member of the Voice MH370 next-of-kin group, said Ocean Infinity initially planned a search last year but it was delayed by the delivery of a new fleet. It is now on track to resume the hunt, he said.

Ocean Infinity CEO Oliver Punkett told the New Straits Times that the company had improved its technology since 2018.

“We now feel in a position to be able to return to the search for MH370,” he told the English-language daily. “We’ve been working with many experts, some outside of Ocean Infinity, to continue analyzing the data in the hopes of narrowing the search area down to one in which success becomes potentially achievable.”

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In the search for MH370, Richard Godfrey – an aerospace engineer – has discovered that after following the coastline of Sumatra the Boeing 777 was put into a holding pattern for 22 minutes before proceeding south.

Mr. Godfrey is using a revolutionary new tracking technology called WSPRnet to track MH370 which it is hoped will lead to a new search.

He discovered that the #MH370 did fly around the coast of Sumatra in Indonesia, most likely without actually crossing the coast line and therefore passing over the territory of Indonesia.

Then, MH370 followed the coastline of Sumatra until 18:56 UTC and then turned South West.

But he also found that MH370 entered a race track holding pattern at around 19:12 UTC lasted for around 22 minutes until 19:34 UTC.

This flight route of MH370 is a result of the WSPRnet analysis. The flight path is at a constant ground speed of 497 knots and a constant altitude of 36,000 feet. There is no contrived descent or ascent to match the Inmarsat satellite data.

There are no contrived turns to match the Inmarsat satellite data timing or a fabricated sighting by Kate Tee. The Inmarsat satellite BTO and BFO data matches perfectly the timing, position and track at the 1st Arc (18:28 UTC BTO and BFO), during the SATCOM call (18:40 UTC, BFO only) and the 2nd Arc (19:41 UTC BTO and BFO). On entering the holding pattern MH370 was 150 nm from the coast of Sumatra and 40 nm from the 2nd Arc.

At 19:44 UTC MH370 was 330.0 nm from the Indonesian military radar station at Sabang, 338.1 nm from Silboga and 347.1 nm from Lhokseumawe, comfortably out of all radar range. Neither the Malaysian nor the Indonesian Military have published any radar data.

Then Mr. Godfrey said: “If the pilot’s goal was to make MH370 disappear without trace, then why waste fuel with a holding pattern and why not head directly to most remote area possible of the Indian Ocean without deviation?”

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MH370 vanished in March, 2014, with Malaysian Airlines Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah dying alongside 238 passengers and crew, including six Australians.
The research by aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey, of the Independent Group of Scientists, set up to solve the MH370 mystery – found that the flight path of the Boeing 777 jet was “significantly different” from earlier modelling based on satellite data.

Mr Godfrey based his findings on weak radio signals that cover the earth, known as the “weak signal propagation report” network, or WSPR.
He said they were like “electronic tripwires” that triggered invisible signals when aircraft crossed them. The signals could then be used to trace the aircraft.
Mr Godfrey’s latest study agreed with the broad flight path of MH370 from satellite data, and its suspected crash site at 34.5 degrees south, south-west of Western Australia.

But his research suggests the pilot had changed direction and speed multiple times to avoid giving any clear idea where he was heading.
“The pilot of MH370 generally avoided official flight routes from 18:00 UTC (2am Australian Western Standard Time) onwards but used waypoints to navigate on unofficial flight paths in the Malacca Strait, around Sumatra and across the Southern Indian Ocean,” Mr Godfrey said.
“The flight path follows the coast of Sumatra and flies close to Banda Aceh Airport.

“The pilot appears to have had knowledge of the operating hours of Sabang and Lhokseumawe radar and that on a weekend night, in times of little international tension the radar systems would not be up and running.”
And Mr Godfrey also said in the case the plane was detected, “the pilot also avoided giving a clear idea where he was heading by using a fight path with a number of changes of direction.”
The many changes of direction and speed also suggest that there was an active pilot during the flight, Mr Godfrey said.

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They believe the Malaysia Airlines jet flew 2,700 miles past Indonesia before crashing into the South Indian Ocean near to the coordinates of S34.2342 and E93.7875.

Victor Iannello, who assisted Australian officials during a previous search, said “there are better than even odds” that the missing passenger plane is within 100 nautical miles of the potential impact site.

Pieces of the Boeing 777-200ER have washed up on coastlines in the western Indian Ocean in the months and years after it vanished with 239 people on board while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on the night of March 8, 2014.

No official explanation has been given and it remains one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries.

One of the leading theories was mass murder-suicide by the pilot.

An underwater search – the second of two major searches – came to a halt in the spring of 2018 and there is nothing to suggest it will resume soon.

Mr Iannello, one of four experts who worked on the crash site study, said: “I won’t speak for the other three authors, but I believe there are better than even odds that the plane is within 100 nautical miles (115 miles) of our last estimated point.

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The debris was discovered by Mick Elcoate, who was fishing in the area on 5 October. Elcoate told The Australian newspaper that he initially thought that the pieces, which were covered in shells, were debris from a yacht. He then decided to post pictures of his find on Facebook. Users told him that the pieces most likely belonged to an airplane.

The pictures of the debris were then shared by a Facebook group called the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA). The group highlighted the similarities between the finding and the Boeing-777 that disappeared over the South China Sea.

Ben Morgan, executive director of the AOPA, said the parts needed to be examined by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB).

The ATSB, for its part, said it doesn’t believe that the debris belongs to Flight MH370. Aviation researcher Mick Gilbert assumed that the parts are likely pieces of Air Niugini Flight 73 that “landed short of the runaway at Chuuk International Airport” in 2018.

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PIA spokesperson Abdul Sattar confirmed the crash and added that Flight 8303 was carrying 90 passengers and 8 crew members from Lahore to Karachi.

Please upload for updates…

• UPDATE Both the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder of PIA A320 have been found.
• UPDATE An aerial footage of PIA A320 crash site has been released by the Army.
  https://twitter.com/Aviation_NewsTW/status/1264120592115982337
• UPDATE Three survivors of the plane crash (one woman and 2 men), 2 died in hospital or on way but were found alive by paramedics.
  
• UPDATE Another CCTV footage shows the crash of the #PK8303 A320.
  
• UPDATE A Pakistani government official reported that at least two passengers of #PK8303 have survived the accident.
• UPDATE Photo of #PK8303 just prior to the crash at Karachi. The RAT is deployed and it looks the pilots tried a belly landing on first attempt.

• 

  UPDATE A passenger of another flight landing in Karachi captured the crash site.

  A passenger of another flight coming to #Karachi filmed #planecrash pic.twitter.com/fJE3d9NCbD

  — Muhammad Yousuf (@muhammadbySky) May 22, 2020

• UPDATE A CCTV footage shows the PIA A320 #PK8303 few seconds before crash.
  
• UPDATE Mayor of Karachi says no survivors after plane crash with 107 on board in Pakistan – AP.
• UPDATE Pilots told ATC they had lost engine(s).
  
• UPDATE New footage from the crash site of PIA #PK8303.
  https://twitter.com/i/status/1263788179662016514
• UPDATE The crew declared a Mayday after a go around during an ILS approach.
• UPDATE The plane was on final to runway 25L.
• UPDATE The A320 has crashed on Residential Area of Kaziamabad-Model Colony just opposite of Karachi Airport.
• UPADTE The Airbus A320 involved is 15 years old with reg. AP-BLD.
  

  #BREAKING

  It was reported that a passenger plane that made the Lahore-Karachi expedition in Pakistan fell into a residential area near Karachi Airport. pic.twitter.com/ckDLgtULJJ

  — GenMedya News (@GenMedyaNews) May 22, 2020

A statement by Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) said Army Quick Reaction Force and Sindh Pakistan Rangers reached the site for relief and rescue efforts alongside civil administration.

Minister of Health & Population Welfare has declared emergency in all major hospitals of Karachi due to the plane crash, according to Meeran Yousuf, the media coordinator to the Sindh health minister.

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The pilot of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was in control of the plane “until the end”, French investigators reportedly suspect, after gaining access to “crucial” flight data.

The readouts “lend weight” to suspicions that he crashed into the sea in a murder-suicide, they were cited as saying.

The revelations based on Boeing data came days after a new account suggesting the pilot may have been clinically depressed, leading him to starve the passengers of oxygen and then crash the Boeing 777 into the sea.

MH370 was on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board, when it vanished and became one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries.

In July last year investigators released a 495-page report, saying the plane’s controls were probably deliberately manipulated to take it off course but they were not able to determine who was responsible.

The only country still conducting a judicial inquiry into the crash is France, where two investigating magistrates are looking into the deaths of three French passengers, the wife and two children of Ghyslain Wattrelos – an engineer who met the judges on Wednesday.

According to Le Parisien, they informed him that Boeing had finally granted them access late May to vital flight data at the plane maker’s headquarters in Seattle.

This included numerous documents and satellite data from Britain-based company Inmarsat.

They were obliged to sign a confidentiality contract, meaning the documents cannot be cited in court. The investigators also visited Inmarsat headquarters in the UK.

It will take “a year” to sift through all the data and “nothing permits us to say the pilot was involved,” according to the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Marie Dosé.

However, French investigators cited by Le Parisien said the data “lends weight’ to the idea that “someone was behind the control stick when the plane broke up in the Indian Ocean”.

It cited a source close to the inquiry as saying someone was flying the plane “until the end.”

“Certain abnormal turns made by the 777 can only have been carried out manually. Someone was in control,” the source was cited as saying.

Asked whether the data pointed to a deliberate crash, the source said: “It’s too early to assert it categorically but there is nothing to suggest anyone else entered the cockpit.”

More than 30 bits of suspected washed up debris have been collected from various places around the world.

Last month, friends of the pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, told aviation specialist William Langewiesche that he had become obsessed with two young models he had seen on the internet after his wife left him, and that he “spent a lot of time pacing empty rooms.”

Mr Langewiesche wrote: “There is a strong suspicion among investigators in the aviation and intelligence communities that he was clinically depressed.”

An electrical engineer quoted in the account in The Atlantic magazine said that, after depressurising the plane, the pilot probably made a climb which “accelerated the effects of depressurising, causing the rapid incapacitation and death of everyone in the cabin.”

The oxygen masks in the main cabin were only designed to last 15 minutes in an emergency descent below 13,000ft.

The pilot, however, would have had access to oxygen in the cockpit and could have flown for hours.

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Malaysia’s transport minister said Sunday that the government is open to new proposals from U.S. technology firm Ocean Infinity or any other companies to resume the hunt for Flight 370, as families of passengers marked the fifth anniversary of the jet’s mysterious disappearance.

Ocean Infinity mounted a “no cure, no fee” search for the plane in the southern Indian Ocean in January 2018 that ended in May without any clue on where it could have crashed.

But the company’s CEO, Oliver Plunkett, said in a video shown at the public remembrance event at a mall near Kuala Lumpur that the company hopes to resume the hunt with better technology it obtained in the past year.

The Ocean Infinity mission came a year after an official search by Malaysia, Australia and China ended in futility.

Transport Minister Anthony Loke said it’s been frustrating that the two searches failed to produce any clues and that he “welcomes credible leads and also concrete proposals to resume the search.”

He told reporters later Sunday that the government is “waiting for specific proposals, in particular from Ocean Infinity.” He brushed off suggestions of offering rewards to find the plane, but said the government is willing to discuss proposals from any companies prepared to resume the search.

“There must be a proposal from a specific company … we cannot just be out there without credible leads. That’s the most practical thing to do,” Loke said.

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A safety report into the disappearance of flight MH370 has concluded that the plane was manually turned around mid-air, rather than being under the control of autopilot, and that “unlawful interference by a third party” could not be ruled out.

It also disproved theories that had suggested the pilot and first officer brought the plane down in a suicide mission, and accusations of mechanical failure.

However, the long-awaited report – which was initially described as the “final report”, although investigators then backtracked from that description – left the hopes of the families dashed after it failed to provide any concrete conclusions about the reasons the plane disappeared nor any indication where the wreckage might be.

Malaysia Airline Flight 370 departed Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12:41 a.m. local time on March 8, 2014 en route to Beijing. At 1:19 a.m. the crew sent a final radio transmission: “Goodnight, Malaysian three seven zero.”

Speaking at a press conference in Putrajaya, Malaysia, Dr Kok Soo Chon, the investigator in charge of the MH370 safety investigation, did not assign blame for the incident but laid out several protocols that were broken by the air traffic control in Malaysia and Vietnam that ensured the plane went missing for 20 minutes before anyone was alerted.

Kok said the team looked into the pilot and first officer’s background. They were qualified, well-rested and showed no signs of anxiety or stress, he said. The plane did not have a malfunction or defect that could explain the disappearance, he said.

Despite two exhaustive searches of the southern Indian Ocean, neither the fuselage nor any bodies have been found. The plane had 227 passengers and 12 crew on board. Only three small pieces of wreckage washed up on or near the east coast of Africa have been confirmed to be from the Boeing 777.

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The search for MH370 by Seabed Constructor appears to be still underway, even though the official search ended this week.

ABC Australia reports that several scientists and aviation buffs that have been following the Seabed Constructor’s search on twitter have noticed that the vessel has moved to a new location and have re-deployed it’s undersea drones. The area is around 5 degrees South, 101 degrees East and was searched by Chinese navy ship Haixun 01 in early April 2014. The Haixun 01 detected two separate pulse signals at the same frequency sent by aircraft black boxes. Other objects were found floating on the ocean about 90km away from the Haixun 01.

Kevin Rupp tweeted Friday morning (Australian time), “Seabed Constructor continued up arc and deployed again, about 20 NM (37 kilometres) north of the Haixun area and then headed south.”

#MH370 My night time update. After my last update Seabed Constructor continued up arc and deployed again, about 20 NM north of the Haixon area and then headed south. Perhaps the press will finally figure out that Ocean Infinity isn’t ready to stop yet. pic.twitter.com/qr97uKRELw

— Kevin Rupp (@LabratSR) June 1, 2018

#MH370 My night time update. Seabed Constructor has been moving north again and probably deploying, however, I’m not sure because she is inside the +22 NM arc and this is a little odd. None the less, they are making amazing progress pic.twitter.com/bS3yp0vkvo

— Kevin Rupp (@LabratSR) June 2, 2018

Seabed Constructor activities from 05GMT 1/6 to 16GMT 2/6. 3 AUVs launched (shown in purple) in that period. No launches in last 13h, 5 AUVs now in operation (from a maximum of 7). As always, AUV positions my estimates based on ship’s movements pic.twitter.com/mEj9fh3imH

— Richard Cole (@richard_e_cole) June 2, 2018

The latest tweet:

#MH370 My morning update. Seabed Constructor moved further north and deployed a couple AUVs meaning they are not going anywhere anytime soon. The northernmost AUV was deployed about 42 NM up arc from the Haixon site. Current position is 25° 27′ 37″ S 102° 03′ 27″ E pic.twitter.com/zUeQznkRiY

— Kevin Rupp (@LabratSR) June 3, 2018

As the official search ended Tuesday, Ocean Infinity, operator of the Seabed Constructor, would no longer be bound by the agreement with the Malaysian government. Ocean Infinity confirmed to ABC News that they were using the last few days to close off as much of the northern side of the search as possible.

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The four-year hunt for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has ended with the latest, privately funded search coming to a close.

US-based Ocean Infinity had been using a deep-sea vessel to survey a vast area of the southern Indian Ocean.

But it found nothing and Malaysia’s government says it has no plans to begin any new searches.

The plane disappeared on 8 March 2014 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

Official search efforts ended last year and there are still fierce debates about what happened to the flight.

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Malaysia’s new transport minister said the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 by a private U.S. firm will end on Tuesday next week and there will be no more extensions.

Houston-based Ocean Infinity has been searching for the aircraft that disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board, in one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries.

“This morning I raised this in cabinet and agreed to extend to May 29,” Anthony Loke told reporters. Asked if that meant no more extensions, he said: “Yes.”

The hunt for the Boeing 777 was previously expected to end in June, as the 90-day agreement did not cover time taken for refuelling and resupplying search vessel Seabed Constructor.

However, Ocean Infinity had finished scouring its targeted search area in April and had requested an extension until May 29.

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