Houston Company Authorized To Resume Search For Malaysian Plane

HOUSTON, TX — The population of the entire world seemed to fixate on the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that disappeared over the Indian Ocean in 2014. Now the eye of Malaysia looks to Texas to continue searching for any pieces of the plane that seemingly vanished in thin air.

On Saturday the Malaysian government agreed to have Houston-based Ocean Infinity to resume the search of the missing Boeing 777 plane under one caveat — Ocean Infinity will only be paid if the wreckage is found.

Ocean Infinity will try to do something that crews from Malaysia, Australia and China couldn't do, and that's to find wreckage. Ocean Infinity has already deployed one vessel to begin the search, according to an Associated Press report.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 departed Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing when it went missing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people aboard. According to reports, 154 passengers were Chinese.

The main wreckage of the plane has yet to be found despite several pieces of debris washing up around the Indian Ocean. The main wreckage is crucial to determine why it crashed and perhaps give any clues as to what happened on that fateful flight.

"The basis of the offer from Ocean Infinity is based on 'no cure, no fee,'" Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai told AP on Saturday. Lai added he didn’t "want to give too much hope" to the next of kin.

The Ocean Infinity search will focus on a 9,600-square-mile area — roughly the size of Vermont — adjacent to the area already searched and which experts called promising after the official search ended. The Malaysian government's search has already covered 46,000 square miles.

The Malaysian government search mapped the ocean floor and then combed the area with sonar that detected items on the ocean floor as small as anchors, cargo containers and cables — without finding any trace of the plane.

Based on electronic signals detected by a satellite, the plane probably stayed in the air more than seven hours until it ran out of fuel. A piece of the wing called a flaperon was the first confirmed debris to wash up, on the island of La Reunion, about 500 days after the crash in July 2015.

Nearly 20 pieces of the plane, including parts of an engine cowling and a bulkhead panel, eventually were recovered from beaches in Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, South Africa and Tanzania.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

Image: Empty waiting chairs in front of the ticketing counter of Malaysian Airlines at the busy terminal of Kuala Lumpur International airport on January 23, 2017 in Sepang, Malaysia. The families of victims onboard the missing flight MH370 said on Sunday they plan to hand deliver a petition and personal letters to Malaysian Transport Minister, Liow Tiong Lai, during his visit to Australia, urging him to resume search for the missing plane after authorities recently announced the international search is suspended. The reputation of Malaysian Airlines remained stained by the flight that went missing in March 2014 while traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers aboard, 154 were Chinese. (Photo by Rahman Roslan/Getty Images)