Search to resume for lost Malaysia Airlines flight MH370

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared from radar on 8 March, 2014, while heading from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. It turned sharply to head out to sea, its transponder went dark, and neither it nor the 239 passengers and crew aboard were ever seen again. After a decade of fruitless attempts to find the lost flight—one of the most extensive and long-lasting underwater search operations in history— the search begins again this week.

A renewed search by Ocean Infinity, a UK and US-based marine robotics company, had begun earlier this year but was called off in April because of bad weather. The Malaysian transport ministry announced this month that the search of the seabed would be conducted intermittently over 55 days from 30 December. Ocean Infinity has agreed a "no find, no fee" contract with Malaysia, under which the company will search a new 5,800-sq-mile (15,000-sq-km) site in the ocean and be paid $70m (£52m) only if wreckage is discovered. The company has declined to comment on the latest search.

The most plausible explanation is murder-suicide by the flight's pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who was said to be depressed and had left a plan of the flight to nowhere in his personal simulator, but officials have been reluctant to pursue this hypothesis. The official report only concludes that the plane was manually turned around, with officials suggesting the crew was quickly incapacitated by hypoxia, smoke or some other unpleasant event aboard the jet. Evidence washed ashore to show it went down roughly where most experts thought it had, but actually finding the wreck has proven impossible in the deep and wide waters of the Indian Ocean. Ocean Infinity isn't saying exactly where it's looking.

Here's a podcast episode from Jeff Wise reviewing the latest updates: