The final search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may be about to begin as families hold out hope for answers

It’s been 11 years, 9 months, and 21 days since Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared. It soon became the most perplexing aviation mystery of all time: how can a passenger jet with 12 crew and 227 passengers simply vanish off the face of the earth?

Even after so long, we don’t have any answers, though the discovery of some small pieces of wreckage verified as coming from MH370 confirms that the plane was destroyed while over the ocean. This means that somewhere in the Indian ocean what remains of the plane is still resting on the seabed, and with it will come important clues as to why it crashed.

The wrinkle is that finding plane wreckage in the vast Indian Ocean is like finding a needle in a haystack. But scientists and investigators have been hard at work narrowing its possible location down, using satellite pings and drift-pattern analysis based on the recovered wreckage.

Now, what might well be the final attempt to locate MH370 is about to commence. UK-based marine robotics company Ocean Infinity has agreed a “no find, no fee” contract with the Malaysian government and is setting out tomorrow, Dec. 30, to search a newly defined 5,800 square mile area of ocean where they think the wreckage must be.

No find, no fee

#Malaysia says it will restart the deep-sea search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight #MH370 by December 30th. Exploration firm Ocean Infinity, based in the United States and United Kingdom, will lead a 55-day seabed hunt. #AviationNews

Read More: https://t.co/nbJRWhgRSu pic.twitter.com/62ftSYOG22

— The American Geographical Society (@AmericanGeo) December 3, 2025

If Ocean Infinity doesn’t find anything, they go home empty-handed. If they do, they’ll be paid $70 million. It’s worth underlining that the company has already scoured the seabed and found nothing. In 2018, they returned from a three-month search with no new information. They returned with new clues in early 2025, but poor weather forced them to call off the hunt in April.

Searching the ocean in this manner is incredibly expensive, which is why the governments involved controversially called off their own searches and have let private companies take on the risk. But even they don’t have bottomless funds, and if this latest hunt for MH370 also fails, it may be the end of the line for actively searching for the majority of the MH370 wreckage.

But it’s out there somewhere. Finding it would give closure to the passengers’ families and also hopefully give us the long-awaited answers over whether the plane intentionally went down due to pilot action, suffered a catastrophic mechanical failure, or something else altogether. Here’s hoping we finally get some real answers.