We should welcome the news that a U.S. company, Ocean Infinity, is negotiating a no-find no-fee contract with the Malaysian government to search for MH-370.
MH-370, a Malaysian Airlines jet carrying 239 passengers and crew, was lost somewhere over the Indian Ocean on March 8, 2014. Until now, various governments have taken the lead in the hunt for the plane’s wreckage, spending over $150 million searching 45,000 square miles–an area larger than Washington State. But having had no success, pressure on government budgets and military resources led these governments to cancel their efforts.
Ocean Infinity’s contract presents the perfect solution to this quandary. The company gets $0 unless it finds MH-370’s main debris field, thus ensuring that taxpayer money won’t be drained on a fruitless oceanic escapade.
Yet Ocean Infinity’s involvement should bring some measure of hope to the families of MH-370 passengers.
After all, the company clearly believes it has a good chance of finding the wreckage or it would not have accepted this contract in the first place. Consider that it will be very expensive for Ocean Infinity to send a ship or flotilla of ships out into the far Indian Ocean for an undetermined amount of time. While the company has obviously gained positive public relations attention for taking on this contract, its costs will inevitably reach into multiple millions of dollars.
This raises a key question: What gives Ocean Infinity confidence that it can find the wreckage?
I think two things.
First, France has already been able to “affirm with certainty” that a flaperon found on Reunion Island in 2015 came from MH-370. Applying that wreckage to drift pattern analysis, Ocean Infinity has probably tied down a much smaller such area where it wants to focus its efforts. We should also assume that Ocean Infinity has spent months using data models to pin down this area. Again, if it hadn’t, Ocean Infinity’s cost-benefit analysis couldn’t justify this contract.
Second, as its website outlines, Ocean Infinity appears to possess a sophisticated array of unmanned drones and seabed monitoring capabilities. If the company is telling the truth about the reach and accuracy of these platforms, it has the credible means to find MH-370’s debris field. The critical question is whether MH-370 broke up on impact or in the sky; if it’s the latter, the debris field will obviously be more dispersed and harder to find.
Regardless, this contract is good news for one simple reason: It means the search goes on.
Correction: An earlier version of this article suggested that Ocean Infinity had agreed a no-find no-fee contract with the Australian government. In fact, the company remains in negotiations with the Malaysian government in pursuit of a no-find no-fee contract.
