On March 8, 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 (MH370) went missing while flying from Kuala Lumpur International Airport to Beijing Capital International Airport. The Boeing 777-200ER aircraft was carrying 12 Malaysian crews and 227 passengers from 15 countries. After months of intensive search, MH370 was still not found.
After a month-long pause, crews restarted the intensive deep-sea search for the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 while an inaccessible expanse of the southern Indian Ocean's floor was charted. According to the Australian Transport Safety Board (ATSB), the GO Phoenix search vessel arrived in the search area and started sweeping the ocean depths on Monday morning with a sonar device known as a tow fish. It manifested the commencement of a possibly year-long search operation.
The search vessel and two others which will be arriving within the month will orchestrate an intensive in-depth search of the missing MH370 with the use of detailed sonar sweeps in an effort to locate wreckage of the aircraft, which was still not found after several months of search missions.
In commercial flight history, the disappearance of MH370 is disputably the utmost mystery, with an intensive search failing to find a single piece of definitive proof of its locations. After the aircraft went missing, an international search operation began in Thailand Gulf and South China Sea, where the plane's signal vanished on secondary surveillance radar and was soon extended to the Malacca Strait and Andaman Sea.
The global search for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 is considered the biggest and the most expensive in history. Up until now, there has been no confirmation of any flight debris and no crash site has been found. The mystery for the sudden disappearance of the aircraft triggered several unofficial theories.
If the presumption of a loss of all lives aboard during its disappearance can be found and verified, MH370 would have been the most lethal aviation incident in the history of Malaysia Airlines and the deadliest involving a Boeing 777. MH370 was exceeded in both regards after 131 days by the crash of another Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, MH17, which was shot down on July 17, 2014 over Ukraine, resulting to all 298 people aboard dead.
Since March 17, 11 countries have joined the search efforts by after more aid was entreated by Malaysia. At the peak of the search effort and before the search was moved to the south Indian Ocean, 26 countries were involved in the search, contributing in summative nearly 60 ships and 50 aircraft.
If the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 is found after the intensive in-depth search, ATSB's Chief Commissioner and CEO Martin Dolan said as per his CNN statement that they are still discussing plans with their Malaysian colleagues on how to proceed in the event of a positive identification of the plane's wreckage.
He continued that if the wreckages field have been found and identified, to be able to know what to do will require careful charting and photo'ing, which will take up to a month. He also added that until they got the fundamentally completed data, they won't fathom the structure of what they're able to do in relative to debris and human remain.
The ATSB official also said that there has been an AUS$60 million allocated by the Australian government for mapping and underwater search, and Australian expenses is to be accorded by Malaysian government. ATSB's Martin Dolan said, "If at the end of that we haven't found MH370, then it's really going to be a matter for governments to decide what's next what resources they might wish to supply and I can't really preempt what that discussion might be."
A new look of thoughtful buoyancy encompasses the search teams, however it appears that there is still a profuse of doubts to overcome before the Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 mystery is finally assuage. And it is largely contingent on where and how the plane is found.
