New Search: Week 2 Results [S2Ep47 video]
Armada 86 05 hit its stride as the weather remained favorable. But the clock is ticking.
Ocean Infinity has completed its second week of searching the seabed of the southern Indian Ocean for the wreckage of the missing Malaysian airliner, MH370, and it’s making good progress. But Armada 86 05, while a modern ship with state-of-the-art technology, isn’t really equipped to keep a substantial crew of mariners out at sea for very long, and the word on the street is that it will have to return to port very soon.
Last week, you’ll remember, Armada 86 05 managed to do just three days of searching before their efforts got cut short due to bad weather. To make matters worse, only two of the AUVs were actually been operational during that time due to mechanical problems with the third.
Well, the good news is that the AUVs are back in the water. Based on the movement of the mothership, work has been proceeding smootlhy, with no delays caused by weather.
Here you can see where the ship had been traveling up to January 6:
And here’s that same image with Armada 86 05’s track from the past week pasted in:
As you can see it has made considerable progress working up along a 40-kilometer wide strip outside the 7th arc. Once this is completed, they will have searched an area extending up to 90 kilometers, or 50 nautical miles outward, from the 7th arc. Armada 86 05 is getting pretty close to the end of the strip that Victor Iannello recommended back in 2023. What happens when they get to it? Will they keep searching to the north, or will they call it good and switch their efforts to the similar rectangular area on the inside of the 7th arc?
Personally I hope that they keep going, because I think they should search as much as possible. Even though they’ve said they’re only going to search 15,000 square kilometers, we have a precedent for them going beyond their stated goals, that’s what happened back in 2018 when they said that they were going to search 25,000 square kilometers and they wound up searching over 100,000 square kilometers.
Now for the bad news. According the ever-reliable Kevin Rupp, Armada 86 05 is probably going to pack it in for the being some time on January 14. It will sail back to Freemantle, arrive there on January 19 at 21Z, which will be 7am Tuesday January 20 local time, and then will set sail again the next day January 20 at 22Z, or 8am local time on Wednesday January 21. Best case scenario, it sails back to the search area at the same speed, and gets there around January 25, and spends at least two more weeks searching. Worst case, it sails off somewhere else to go do something else, and we find ourselves sitting on our hands again waiting for them to come back and get down to business again.
You’ll remember that around the New Year, Ocean Infinity sent the MH370 family members a couple of detailed updates that included those details about how much they were searching, what the weather was like, mechanical issues, and so forth. Well unfortunately, the MH370 Families group is now reporting that Ocean Infinity has told them it will no longer provide those updates:
No new updates have been provided to family members since the last update on 5th January 2026. We have been made to understand that there will be no daily or weekly updates. Rather, we would be notified via periodic updates as and when available.
So I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Meanwhile, at the end of today’s episode I share a video from 2010 that purports to be a Malaysia Airlines flight from 2010 which was conducted by the same aircraft that was operating as MH370 when it disappeared in 2014. It includes a PA announcement by the captain, and some people say he’s saying that his name is “Zaharie Shah,” but I’m not convinced. You can check out the whole thing here.