A Houston company is negotiating to conduct a "no find, no fee" private search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, after three governments failed in a three-year, $160 million effort.
The Boeing 777-200ER is presumed to have crashed after it went missing March 8, 2014 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard, including six Australians.
Just days ago, Australia's Transport Safety Bureau, which has led the $200 million global search for the plane, released a final report saying they have a "better understanding than ever" of where downed flight MH370 is but that it is "unacceptable" the plane has not been found.
Malaysia's Department of Civil Aviation said on Friday that it was weighing several private offers to search for the plane, including one from Ocean Infinity, a Houston firm that surveys the ocean floor.
The only confirmed piece of debris from flight MH370 washed up on Reunion Island in July 2015.Credit: FDC
Ocean Infinity offered to search without payment unless the plane was found, but the offer is still being assessed and no agreement has been reached yet, according to the statement from Azharudden Abdul Rahman, the department's director general.
Ocean Infinity's spokesman didn't immediately respond Friday to a request for comment.
The negotiations are somewhat confusing. Australia's transport minister Darren Chester said on Thursday that an agreement had been "accepted" between Malaysia and Ocean Infinity, but his confirmation was later contradicted by Rahman.
"While I am hopeful of a successful search, I'm conscious of not raising hopes for the loved ones of those on board," Chester said in a statement. "Ocean Infinity will focus on searching the seafloor in an area that has previously been identified by experts as the next most likely location to find MH370. Australia, at Malaysia's request, will provide technical assistance to the Malaysian Government and Ocean Infinity."
The disappearance of MH370 is one of aviation's greatest mysteries.Credit: AP
If an agreement is reached, Malaysia said it would notify Australia and China first, then the families of the missing. The families have urged the governments repeatedly to continue the search, after it was called off in January.
The Transport Safety Bureau has led the search for the plane with Malaysia and China. Based on clues from satellite data, the search focused on a section of ocean floor the size of Pennsylvania, about 1600 kilometres west of Perth.
In the years since, at least 18 pieces of the plane washed up on islands and parts of Africa. But after painstakingly mapping the ocean floor, towed sonar vessels hired by the governments found no trace of the main wreckage.
The governments have acknowledged that a more promising area to search might be north of the previous search zone, in an area about the size of Vermont.
Ocean Infinity could provide an advantage to a private search by deploying six autonomous underwater vehicles to scan the ocean floor nearly 20,000 feet deep.
The governments had towed sonar vehicles on cables behind ships, which was difficult in bad weather or around mountainous underwater terrain.
The autonomous vehicles travel up to 11 km/h, which is about twice as fast as towed sonar, and they are more manoeuvrable, said Al Diehl, a former crash investigator for the US National Transportation Safety Board.
"It's more flexible," said Diehl, who suggested two years ago that the search should include autonomous vehicles. "This is kind of interesting."
The search by numbers
- 1046 days spent searching
- 710,000sq/km of Indian Ocean seafloor mapped, the largest ever single hydrographic survey
- 120,000sq/km of high-resolution sonar, also the largest ever search or survey of its kind
- 661 areas of interest identified in sonar imagery of the seafloor, 82 of which were investigated and eliminated as being related to MH370
- Four shipwrecks identified in the area searched
McClatchy, AAP