Nearly 12 years after one of aviation’s most enduring mysteries unfolded, the Malaysian government has greenlit a 12-month extension to its search agreement with U.S.-British marine robotics firm Ocean Infinity, renewing hopes of finally resolving the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
Transport Minister Anthony Loke announced on Monday that the country’s cabinet formally approved the extension of the “no-find, no-fee” contract on Friday, pushing the deadline for the deep-sea search operation in the southern Indian Ocean to June 30, 2025. In an official statement, Loke emphasized that the decision underscores the Malaysian government’s unbroken commitment to delivering closure to the families of the 239 passengers and crew who went missing alongside the aircraft.
The Boeing 777 vanished from civilian radar screens in the early hours of March 8, 2014, mid-flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Most of those on board were Chinese nationals. After the jet unexpectedly veered off its planned flight route, satellite tracking data traced its path south into the remote southern Indian Ocean, where experts widely conclude it ultimately crashed. Multiple official searches conducted by a multinational coalition between 2014 and 2017 failed to locate the main wreckage, though a small number of confirmed debris fragments washed up on coastlines across East Africa and remote Indian Ocean islands in the years following the disappearance. Ocean Infinity first ran a private search mission for the wreckage in 2018, which also returned no conclusive findings.
Malaysia first reactivated the search with Ocean Infinity last year, granting the firm access to a new 15,000-square-kilometer search zone. Under the terms of the original agreement, the company will only receive the $70 million payout if it successfully locates the aircraft’s wreckage. The extension comes after Ocean Infinity temporarily pulled its core search vessels off the MH370 mission to fulfill pre-existing commercial contracts, leaving roughly 7,428 square kilometers (2,868 square miles) of the designated search zone still uncharted. The additional 12 months will give the firm time to fully survey the remaining area.
Loke noted that Ocean Infinity is scheduled to redeploy its search vessels to the MH370 search area between November 2024 and April 2025, a seasonal window that brings calmer ocean conditions. This period is widely recognized as the safest and most effective time to conduct deep-sea exploration operations in the remote southern Indian Ocean, reducing risks for crews and increasing the likelihood of accurate sonar mapping of the seabed.