The latest search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has been suspended as it is “not the season”, Malaysia’s transport minister said, more than a decade after the plane went missing.
In a voice recording sent to AFP on Thursday (Apr 3) by his aide, Transport Minister Anthony Loke said, “They have stopped the operation for the time being, they will resume the search at the end of this year”.
“It’s not the right season at the moment,” Loke said in the recording made during an event at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on Wednesday.
Flight MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The plane had 239 people on board and vanished from radar. Despite being the biggest search in aviation history, the plane has never been found.
In early March this year, the Malaysian government said a new search had started, led by a company called Ocean Infinity. The company had also searched for the plane in 2018 but found nothing.
Earlier searches covered huge areas of the Indian Ocean — the first one led by Australia searched 120,000 square kilometres and only found a few pieces of debris.
Ocean Infinity is now searching a smaller area of 15,000 square kilometres in the southern Indian Ocean. The agreement is “no find, no fee” — meaning the company only gets paid if they find the plane.
There are many theories about what happened to MH370. Some believe the pilot went rogue, while others think someone else took control. A report in 2018 said air traffic control made mistakes, and the plane’s path had been changed by hand. But even after years of investigations, no one knows for sure why the plane disappeared.
Most of the passengers were from China, with others from Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, and other countries. Families of the victims are still asking for answers. On the 11th anniversary of the disappearance last month, Chinese families held a protest in Beijing, shouting, “Give us back our loved ones!” and holding signs asking, “When will the 11 years of waiting and pain end?”
