Kuala Lumpur—Malaysia’s Transport Minister Anthony Loke announced on March 3 that the country is “more than willing” to reopen the search for flight MH370, which disappeared almost exactly five years ago, on March 8, 2014, if there are any new leads or plans for the search.
Mr Loke told reporters, “If there are any credible leads or specific proposals, especially from Ocean Infinity, we are more than willing to look at them and we are prepared to discuss with them the new proposals.”
Families of the 239 passengers and crew aboard the ill-fated flight gathered in Kuala Lumpur on March 3 to commemorate the fifth year of the plane’s disappearance.
Ocean Infinity is the tech company based in the United States that has combed the seas looking for remnants of the plane but failed to find any.
The company sent a video message to the relatives of the downed plane, telling them Ocean Infinity has not given up on the search. The firm is examining how more advanced technology can help it find MH370, in the same way, it was able to recently find a missing submarine belonging to Argentina.
Loke said, “If they (Ocean Infinity) can convince us that the new technology can be more efficient in terms of the search, then we are more than willing to restart.”
Only parts of the plane’s wings and fuselage have been found thus far in the Indian Ocean beaches and islands.
In the past, Malaysia announced that it would not commence a new search unless credible evidence of found parts would be presented.
Relatives of the missing crew and passengers of MH370 have renewed hope at the possibility of a re-opened search.
But should such a search commence, it will possibly not be launched until next summer when conditions in the Indian Ocean will be favorable for exploration.
The flight had been en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it went missing. Despite the discovery of debris in the Indian Ocean, the location where the flight went down is still unknown.
Malaysia, China, and Australia launched an underwater search effort that ultimately cost S$191 million, but had to be called off by January 2017 after the efforts bore little fruit.
Ocean Infinity launched its effort to find the plane, but also called it off in May 2018.
On Sunday, March 3, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Dr Tun Mahathir Mohamad met with a woman whose husband went missing on the flight. He assured her that he would fight to continue searching for MH370 “as long as there is hope.”
He echoed this in an interview with 60 Minutes Australia. “We intend to continue and nowadays with electronic detection, it may be possible for us to find where the plane had come down.”
“Losing an aircraft is one thing, but losing people is something else. You can’t sleep thinking about what has happened, you keep on asking yourself that question and you get no answer.”
A report from UK news website Express.co.uk, also published on March 3, stated that Daniel Boyer, an amateur investigator, recently made an important discovery about the missing aircraft.
Mr Boyer said that the Cambodian jungle is 99 percent most likely to be the site where the MH370 plane may have crashed, based on the satellite images he found.
He sent an expedition team that could not reach the site because of how remote it is, but team leader Zorba Parer is convinced that this is where the plane landed.
He told Express.co.uk, “Conclusively, Zorba’s report was that due to its remote location kilometres off the nearest dirt road it had to be a plane crash, although his team was not able to safely arrive so he wasn’t able to conclude what specific plane it was.
I believe that when you compare a Boeing 777 from the satellite view on an airport tarmac and compare it side by side with the crash site, the colour of the wreckage matches perfectly and some larger parts of the crash site are symmetrical to a Boeing 777.”
Mr Boyer added that locals had seen a flight come down in the same location as the proposed crash site during that time.
Read related: MH370 link: Cambodia’s jungle ‘99% likely’ Malaysian plane’s crash site, says report
https://theindependent.sg.sg/mh370-link-cambodias-jungle-99-likely-malaysian-planes-crash-site-says-report/