MH370 search breakthrough after sea expert says he has the gear to find it
Not solving it 'wouldn't be fair to the families', he said.
A deep sea expert has vowed to finally find Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH370) more than a decade after the jetliner vanished.
The aircraft, a Boeing 777 carrying 239 people, disappeared during a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, to Beijing on March 8, 2014.
Where the craft is, with some believing it crashed in the southern Indian Ocean and others claiming it vanished into a black hole, remains one of the biggest aviation mysteries of all time.
Now Tony Romeo, the CEO of Deep Sea Vision, hopes to finally put the cold case to rest and give the families of the missing closure.
Romeo told 60 Minutes Australia on Sunday that the American marine robotics company plans to send a submersible into the ocean to find the missing aircraft.
He said: ‘It flies at 50 metres above the seafloor and it just goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
‘Big eyes, looking at everything it can see, sucks and stores data, comes back up to the surface, we pluck a thumb drive into it, pull the data out, and we watch it on a computer exactly what it looked at.’
Investigators, both official and private, have over the years combed more than 46,000 square miles of the Indian Ocean floor. Despite this, no plane, victims or answers have ever been recovered.
Romeo said that his company’s ‘unbelievable’ drones can search four times that, with scanners able to pick up on the tiniest crinkles on the seafloor.
The craft, Hugin 6000, has an operating depth of 6,000 metres, according to manufacturer Kongsberg Maritime.
Deep Sea Vision is now preparing to submit a search bid to the Malaysian government, with officials already examining another firm’s proposals.
The robotics company made headlines earlier this year when it claimed it captured a sonar image in the Pacific Ocean that ‘appears to be Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra’ aircraft.
Earhart, who tried to become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, vanished 87 years ago during her ill-fated voyage.
‘I feel like we’ve proved our credibility, we’ve proved our competence,’ Romeoa added to 60 Minutes on Sunday.
‘We’ve proved our ability to take equipment and use novel techniques. And I believe that the Malaysian government wants answers.
‘I refuse to believe that they do not want a huge accident, a huge crash like this to go unresolved. It just isn’t fair, it wouldn’t be fair to the families.’
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