US firm offers to resume search for missing MH370

Bangkok, Aug 3 (IANS) American firm Ocean Infinity, that specialises in seabed exploration, has offered to resume the search for MH370, the Malaysia Airlines flight that went missing in 2014 with 239 people on board.

Mark Antelme, of Ocean Infinity, told EFE news on Thursday that the company will resume the search for free and will ask for a reward only if it manages to locate the wreckage.

The Malaysia Airlines plane had disappeared from the radar on March 8, 2014, around 40 minutes after it took off from Kuala Lumpur.

According to the official investigation, someone had switched off the communications system and changed the plane's route towards the Indian Ocean.

In January, Malaysia, Australia and China had called off the unsuccessful search that was carried out over an area of 120,000 square km at an estimated cost of $135 million.

In July, experts of the Australian agency, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), narrowed down the area where the flight might have disappeared to a 25,000 square kilometre block of the Indian Ocean.

The scientists traced the aircraft with the help of ocean drift modelling in the laboratory using the aircraft's possible course, the amount of fuel it was carrying, and a model of the marine currents of the region to determine that the plane may have crashed near the degree 35 south of the "seventh arc", an area in the Indian Ocean.

Meanwhile, the Voice370 group, comprising family members of the missing passengers, said they were disappointed at the lack of official response to Ocean Infinity's offer.

Ocean Infinity claims to have the world's most advanced fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles to survey the seabed and carry out mapping up to a depth of 6,000 metres.

So far, MH370 debris have been recovered from the beaches of the French island of Reunion, Mozambique, Mauritius, South Africa and Pemba Island (Zanzibar).