The Search is Back On -- AGAIN! [S2Ep58]
Ocean Infinity said it was done searching the seabed. Now Malaysia says: "not so fast"
I feel like a bit of a broken record here, but — the search for MH370 is back on. In a stunning new development Malaysia’s Ministry of Transport announced on Monday, June 29, 2026 that it has extended by one year the no-find, no-fee search deal that it made with Ocean Infinity last March.
Under the terms of that deal, Ocean Infinity would scan a 15,000 square kilometer area of the southern Indian Ocean near the 7th arc and receive $70 million if it managed to find the missing plane’s wreckage. The company would have 18 months to complete the search.
At the time the deal was inked, the company had already dispatched one of its ships to the area and started using autonomous robot subs to search the seabed with sidescan sonar. It then halted the search at the end of the month, in anticipation of bad winter weather, and restarted in December. But work progressed very slowly and Ocean Infinity threw in the towel again less than a month later.
This past March, the company put out a statement in which Oliver Plunkett, its CEO, seemed to lower expectations that the company would extend its work anytime soon.
It was important for us to take advantage of every piece of information and data available and go back, but despite all that effort, we haven’t been able to find it… If nothing else, we can say with confidence that it isn’t where we looked. That matters – it brings clarity, and it will help those continuing to study the evidence refine their thinking and shape future search strategies. Although this phase of the search has concluded, our commitment has not. We’re continuing to work with the Malaysian Government in the hope of being able to return when circumstances allow.
Personally, I interpreted this as meaning that the company had no intention of coming back, but perhaps that stance was just a negotiating tactic.
I’ve reached out to Ocean Infinity for comment but haven’t yet heard back.
Under the new deal, Ocean Infinity will search quite a small area, compared to the vast area it covered during during its first search in 2018: just 7,428.54 sq km, versus more than 112,000 sq km.
The company will have from July 1 of this year until June 30 of next year to conduct this new phase of the search. But there’s no chance it will use that whole time period for seafloor scanning, or even a very large part of it.
Because it is using its fleet of ships elsewhere and they are tied up for the near future, the Malaysian Government says that, per Reuters, “the search’s primary assets are to be temporarily redeployed to another location between November 2026 and April 2027.”
Since it’s currently wintertime in the southern Ocean, and historically no one has been willing to carry out seabed searches during that season, I interpret this to mean that the next round of searching will take place between April and June of next year.
Malaysia’s Transport Minister Anthony Loke said in a today’s statement that, “this decision is a manifestation of the government’s continuous and unwavering commitment to provide a closure for the next of kin of the passengers aboard flight MH370.”
So, we’re back on, but nothing is going to be done for a while—about ten months.
However, I do think that this is a significant new chapter in the search for MH370. The cold case has been reopened. In future episodes I’ll talk about where they’re going to look, what they’ll do if they find it, and what we should expect.