Will a Texas firm finally find Malaysia flight 370?
A Texas-based company could earn between $20 million and $70 million and if it finds any of the wreckage of the Malaysian jetliner that went missing over the Indian Ocean in 2014. Or it could wind up with nothing under the terms of a 90-day contract that it's negotiating with the Malaysian government.
The contract provision known as "no cure, no fee" is common in the marine salvage industry and is one of the many challenges facing Ocean Infinity in finding Malaysian Airlines flight 370. That flight went down between Malaysia's capital of Kuala Lumpur and Beijing with 272 passengers and a 12-person crew.
The contract will require Ocean Infinity to search 25,000 square kilometers (15,534 square miles) off the coast of Australia, an area larger than New Jersey, according to the Australian TV Network ABC. And that's just one of the daunting logistical hurdles it faces.
"Rough terrain can mask a lot of objects, so they're using acoustics to map the sea floor," said Mike Purcell, principal engineer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who helped find the wreckage of a downed Air France jetliner in 2011. "If there's a lot of steep terrain, it can be tough to collect data in those areas."
Patience also is a must because the unmanned underwater vehicles that Ocean Infinity is using move at about 3 miles per hour and have visibility of less than a mile, according to Purcell, who compared the search to finding a "needle in a haystack." The Air France plane was found two years after it crashed in 2009.
Ocean Infinity will "use multiple surface vessels and multiple underwater vehicles," he said, adding that he isn't connected to the flight 370 search.
Though the Malaysian government has agreed to accept Ocean Infinity's offer "in principle" to find the wreckage, spokesman Mark Antelme told CBS MoneyWatch that he couldn't comment on the deal until it was officially awarded, which he expected would happen soon. At Malaysia's request, the Australian government will be providing technical assistance in the new search.
Ocean Infinity will focus its efforts in an area of the seafloor that experts have identified as a likely location of flight 370 off the coast of Australia. A $200 million search that covered 120,000 square miles by the governments of Malaysia, Australia and China was called off in January after failing to locate the wreckage. Some parts of the doomed Boeing 777 have washed ashore after the crash.
In a blistering report, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau noted, "It is almost inconceivable and certainly societally unacceptable in the modern aviation era with 10 million passengers boarding commercial aircraft every day, for a large commercial aircraft to be missing and for the world not to know with certainty what became of the aircraft and those on board."
Ocean Infinity, however, appears more optimistic it'll be able to solve one of the biggest mysteries in the history of aviation.
