美国有线新闻 CNN MH370搜寻工作重启 美国私人勘探公司将接手

AZUZ: Up next, a restart in the search for a missing passenger jet in the Indian Ocean. Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 vanished on March 8, 2014. It was flying from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China, with 239 people on board. But it suddenly changed course during its trip and headed toward the Southern Indian Ocean. Some pieces of the plane have washed up in Tanzania, an island east of the African continent.

But despite an underwater search that lasted almost three years after the plane's disappearance 1, the governments of Australia, China, and Malaysia suspended their search operations last January. They never found out what happened to the plane, but there's new hope that the mystery will one day be solved.

MATT RIVERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: With the official government-led search into what happened to MH-370 ended about a year ago now, but now, this U.S.-based private company called Ocean Infinity 2 says it will pick up where those governments left off.

The official search went over an area of 120,000 square kilometers. That was at the time where investigators 3 believed this plane would be most likely to be. But at the end of that search, investigators also pointed 4 to a 25,000 square kilometer area nearby, they said that could also be an area where this plane could be found.

That smaller area is where Ocean Infinity says it will be focusing its search. And it says that it has the technology to do so. It said it's different than what the governments used. It said that they had these things called autonomous 5 underwater vehicles. That means that they're underwater vehicles that are not tethered to ships on the surface. Because of that, the company says that they can go deeper, collect higher quality data and it makes their technology ideal for this search.

The search terms, the deal that they struck with the Malaysian government, this will be a 90-day search, only about three months to search this 25,000 square kilometer area and it's on "no find, no fee" deal. Meaning that if the company doesn't find the plane, then they're not going to get paid by the Malaysian government. They're taking on the economic risks, at least to start.

And while the whole world is interested in what happened to this plane, what caused it to disappear, the people who are most interested in finding out what happened would, of course, be the family members of this 230-plus people who disappeared when the plane itself disappeared. We reached out to some of those family members who live here in Beijing earlier and the general theme was that they are happy that the search is continuing, but they say there's been a lack of transparency in this process going back years. And despite this latest development, they're not really expecting anything to change.

Matt Rivers, CNN, Beijing.