More than ten years after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went missing, Kuala Lumpur’s transport minister announced that the current search for the plane has been halted since it is “not the season.”
Transport Minister Anthony Loke said on Thursday that “They have stopped the operation for the time being, they will resume the search at the end of this year.”
On March 8, 2014, the Boeing 777 carrying 239 people disappeared from radar screens while en-route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Despite the biggest search in aviation history, the plane has not been discovered.
Loke’s remarks came a little more than a month after authorities announced that the search had begun, following previous futile operations that covered wide parts of Indian Ocean.
An initial Australia-led search covered 120,000 square kilometres (46,300 square miles) in the Indian Ocean over three years, but found hardly any trace of the plane other than a few pieces of debris.
Maritime exploration firm Ocean Infinity, based in Britain and the United States, led an unsuccessful hunt in 2018, before agreeing to launch a new search this year.
Loke said in December that a new 15,000 square kilometre area of the southern Indian Ocean would be scoured by Ocean Infinity.
The most recent mission was conducted on the same “no find, no fee” principle as Ocean Infinity’s previous search, with the government only paying out if the firm finds the aircraft.
The plane’s disappearance has long been the subject of theories — ranging from the credible to outlandish — including that veteran pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah had gone rogue.
A final report into the tragedy released in 2018 pointed to failings by air traffic control and said the course of the plane was changed manually.
Investigators said in the 495-page report that they still did not know why the plane vanished, and refused to rule out that someone other than the pilots had diverted the jet.
Two-thirds of the passengers were Chinese, while the others were from Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, and elsewhere.
Relatives of passengers lost on the flight have continued to demand answers from Malaysian authorities.
Family members of Chinese passengers gathered in Beijing outside government offices and the Malaysian embassy last month on the 11th anniversary of the flight’s disappearance.
