MH 370 News: New Search For Missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 Begins

Nearly four years after the unsolved disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Malaysian government officials announced a new expedition to search for the wreckage on Saturday.

The hunt began on Tuesday in the southern Indian Ocean, led by U.S.-based company Ocean Infinity. According to Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai, the company’s offer was agreed to under the terms of “no cure, no fee,” meaning that payment will only be issued if the wreckage is found.

“That means they are willing to search the area of 25,000 square kilometers (9,653 square miles) pointed out by the expert group near the Australian waters,” Lai said.

The 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8, 2014. The flight was headed to Beijing when it disappeared.

According to Lai, the Malaysian government is still committed to finding the lost plane, but does not want to raise too much hope among the victims’ families in case nothing is discovered.

Ocean Infinity’s search vessel, Seabed Constructor, left from the South African port of Durban on Tuesday and has on board several unmanned submarines that can descend deep into the ocean. The company hopes to take advantage of favorable weather to move the vessel close “towards the vicinity of the possible search zone,” they said in a statement.

The original search mission for the airline was called off last January by governments in Malaysia, China, and Australia. Despite searching for more than 1,000 days a concrete conclusion was never reached as to where or why Flight 370 vanished.

However, by studying debris that washed ashore in 2015 and 2016 the search team now has a better idea of where the plane may be. The debris showed the plane was “not configured for a ditching at the end-of-flight,” meaning the aircraft had run out of fuel.

Ocean Infinity also utilized satellite technology to find objects in the ocean believed to be debris from MH370.