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The second search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 ended Tuesday after a fruitless 90-day sweep of the southern Indian Ocean. US-based Ocean Infinity had been using a deep-sea vessel to survey a vast area of the southern Indian Ocean, but found nothing and Malaysia's government says it has no plans to begin any new searches.

The plane disappeared on 8 March 2014 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

 

Official search efforts ended last year and there are still fierce debates about what happened to the flight.

 

"Part of our motivation for renewing the search was to try to provide some answers to those affected. It is therefore with a heavy heart that we end our current search without having achieved that aim," Ocean Infinity CEO Oliver Plunkett said in a statement.

 

"There simply has not been a subsea search on this scale carried out as efficiently or as effectively ever before."


An initial search, carried out by Malaysia, China and Australia, was called off in January last year. It was estimated to have cost about 200 million Australian dollars ($151 million).

 

"Whilst clearly the outcome so far is extremely disappointing, as a company, we are truly proud of what we have achieved both in terms of the quality of data we've produced and the speed with which we covered such a vast area," Plunkett said.

 

Several theories on what might have occured to the ill-fated flight have been put forward, including pilot suicide.

 

Australian investigators who led the joint search for the jetliner dismissed that theory and have defended their belief that the plane's disappearance was due to an accident.

 

 

 

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