
KUALA LUMPUR: The latest search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has been suspended because it is not a “season”, the Kuala Lumpur transport minister said.
Transport Secretary Anthony Loke is sending to AFP Thursday, his assistant.
“Now, this is not the season,” Locke said in the recording, which was held at an event on Wednesday at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
On March 8, 2014, the Boeing 777 carrying 239 people disappeared from the radar screen, while on the way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Despite the largest searches in aviation history, no aircraft have been found.
Loke’s comments came more than a month after authorities said the search was restored, after a failed attempt to cover a huge fragment of the Indian Ocean.
Originally, the Australian-led search covered 120,000 square kilometers (46,300 square miles) of the Indian Ocean, but found little traces of the plane, except for a few pieces of debris.
Ocean Infinity, a UK- and US-based marine exploration company, conducted an unsuccessful hunt in 2018, and then agreed to conduct a new search this year.
“No one can predict whether it will be constrained by searches,” Locke said, referring to the wreckage of the plane.
Aviation Mystery
Loke said in December that the 15,000 square kilometers area of the southern Indian Ocean will be unlimitedly searched by the ocean.
The recent mission is based on the “no discovery, no fees” principle of Ocean Unlimited Search, which the government only pays when the company finds the plane.
The plane’s disappearance has long been the subject of theory – from credible to quirky searches – including research by veteran pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah.
The final report on the tragedy released in 2018 shows that air traffic control failed and says the process of the aircraft has been manually changed.
Investigators said in a 495-page report that they still don’t know why the plane disappeared, and refused to exclude others from the pilots to transfer the plane.
Two-thirds of the passengers are Chinese, while the others come from Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia and elsewhere.
Relatives of the passengers who lost the flight continued to ask for answers from Malaysian authorities.
The families of Chinese passengers gathered at the embassies in Beijing and Malaysia outside government offices last month on the 11th anniversary of the flight’s disappearance.
The attendees at the party shouted, “Give it back to our loved ones!”
Some placards holders asked, “When will the 11 years of waiting and torture end?”