Photo: Rob Griffith/AP Photo
The third search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has begun, 11 years after the plane practically vanished. On Sunday, a ship belonging to the American maritime-survey company Ocean Infinity arrived at a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean where the plane is believed to have crashed. It then deployed a trio of advanced robot subs three miles under the waves to scan the seabed using sonar waves. If successful, the effort will locate the wreckage of the aircraft together with the black boxes that will allow investigators to solve the mystery. If not, it will effectively disprove the analysis underlying the seabed search and suggest that officials bungled some fundamental assumptions.
The first underwater search for the missing plane was launched more than a decade ago, months after MH370 disappeared from air-traffic controllers’ screens on March 8, 2014, during a routine red-eye flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China. Scientists at the satellite-communications company Inmarsat later found that the plane had sent seven automatic radio signals before vanishing for good. In analyzing the data, scientists were able to extract a route from Malaysia into the southern Indian Ocean and concluded that the plane’s wreckage must lie near the end point of this path. Australia, which was responsible for finding the plane due to the search-and-rescue zone, hired a Dutch marine-survey company, Fugro, which dispatched a trio of ships to drag underwater sensors over the seabed. At first, officials were highly confident that they would locate the plane in short order, with one boasting that they had a 97 percent chance of success. But the plane was not in the search area measuring 46,000 square miles. Fugro increased the size of the search zone, then increased it again, without success. In 2017, the search was abandoned.
Hopes for finding the plane on the seabed would have ended there had not Ocean Infinity stepped forward the following year and offered to restart the search on its own dime, with payment only forthcoming if it was successful in finding MH370. Ocean Infinity used newer technology: autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that could prowl the depths in packs. Deployed from a single ship, the AUVs scanned an area nearly as big as the first search in a fraction of the time. But this effort, too, was in vain, and Ocean Infinity’s second search was called off in May 2018.
In the years since its first search, Ocean Infinity has earned a name for itself as a highly capable underwater-survey company, not least by locating the wreck of a missing Argentine submarine in 2018. Since 2022, Ocean Infinity has launched a fleet of eight state-of-the-art, 250-foot-long ships that are capable of operating autonomously. It is one of these, Armada 78 06, that is currently on station in the search area, tending a flotilla of AUVs.
After the second search, there was no reason to continue looking. Any reasonable scenario involving the plane’s direction, speed, or changes in heading would have resulted in an end point in the ocean that had already been scanned. Malaysia, which retained overall responsibility for the investigation, announced that it would not authorize any further searches unless “new and credible information” emerged indicating where exactly the plane had ended up.
No such information was forthcoming, but over the years various independent researchers continued to study the mystery, with some speculating that various lines of evidence all indicated a final resting place close to 35 degrees south latitude. The area had already been searched twice, but the ocean floor is rugged enough that the wreckage just might have been missed by earlier searches because it had fallen behind an outcropping or into a ravine. (Alternatively, if someone had hijacked the plane, they might have put it into an extended glide that took it beyond the area scanned so far.) It’s this area that Ocean Infinity has now begun to search, less than a tenth of the size of previous searches. If the wreckage is there, the AUVs will likely find it quickly.
Given the scope of the search, it’s entirely possible that the seabed scan will be finished before the 11th anniversary of MH370’s disappearance in two weeks. If the wreckage is found, Armada 78 06 will likely deploy a different kind of robot sub called an ROV (remotely operated vehicle) to retrieve the black boxes, including a flight-data recorder that will show exactly how the plane flew into the southern ocean and a cockpit voice recorder that may contain clues about what happened to the pilots.
If the wreckage is not found, the picture will be altogether different. The plane’s absence will strongly suggest that the authorities must have made a fundamental error when they analyzed the Inmarsat data. It will no longer be possible to say that they were just unlucky, that they happened to draw a line around a part of the probability distribution that didn’t include the plane. By this point, every point in the ocean where the plane could plausibly have gone will have been searched. One or more of their assumptions must have been wrong.
There could be a positive outcome to the failure of the third and final seabed search: a long-overdue realization that investigators have been sleepwalking down a dead-end path. This, hopefully, will spur those responsible for finding the plane to acknowledge the failure of the past approach and bring in fresh blood. The case is too important to let go with a shrug and a wave of the hand. Eleven years ago, 239 people disappeared into the night. Until we make every effort to figure out what happened — including taking the painful step of admitting that all our past efforts were misguided — then we’ll never solve the case, and there will be no way to say for sure that the same won’t happen again.
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