SYDNEY: More than 11 years after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, the Malaysian government has approved a new search for the missing debris of the aircraft.

Malaysia announced the push for a renewed search last year, 10 years after the tragedy that claimed the lives of 239 people.

Seabed exploration firm Ocean Infinity, which conducted an unsuccessful search in 2018, prepared a new proposal to which Malaysia’s government agreed in principle in December last year.

Now, the company has returned to the southern Indian Ocean 1,500km west of Perth – with a suite of new high-tech tools.

A SEARCH AREA THE SIZE OF SYDNEY

Ocean Infinity is involved in projects surveying for offshore oil and gas reserves, and for suitable locations for offshore renewable energy projects.

But it has also proved it is capable of locating underwater wreckage in the past. For example, in 2018, the company found a missing Argentinian navy submarine nearly 1,000m underwater in the Atlantic Ocean. And last October, it found the wreck of a US Navy ship that had been underwater for 78 years.

The new search area for MH370 is roughly the size of metropolitan Sydney. It was identified in collaboration with experts based on refined analysis of information received after the aircraft disappeared. This information included weather, satellite data and the location of debris attributed to the aircraft which washed up along the coast of Africa and islands in the Indian Ocean.

For this search, Ocean Infinity will be using a new 78m offshore support vessel, the Armada 7806. It was built by Norwegian shipbuilder Vard in 2023.

ADVANCED SONAR TECHNOLOGY

The Armada 7806 is equipped with a fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles manufactured by the Norwegian firm Kongsberg.

These 6.2m long vehicles are capable of operating independently of the support vessel at depths of up to 6,000m for up to 100 hours at a time. They are equipped with adv...