Flight MH370 Latest Update: Ocean Infinity To Use Swarm Of Drone-Like AUVs

A U.S. company will be deploying the world’s most advanced undersea search vessels in a renewed bid to search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which went missing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board.

Texas-based Ocean Infinity — which has signed a "no cure, no fee" deal with the Malaysian government to find the jetliner — will for the first time use a swarm of eight drone-like autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to scour a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean, where the ill-fated plane is believed to have gone down.

The company will be paid only if it succeeds in locating the plane, which is believed to have gone down while on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

According to the Daily Beast, Ocean Infinity will conduct the new search with the latest technology north of the original search area, where an underwater operation for more than three years yielded no concrete clues. The operation cost millions of dollars, making it one of the costliest search operations in aviation history.

Talking about the technology that the company will use, the Daily Beast reported that the system was being used for the first time and that while en route from the Caribbean to the search site, the command ship, Seabed Constructor, paused several times to carry out trials at depths similar to those at the Indian Ocean search site.

Ocean Infinity plans to find Flight MH370's flight data recorder, which could hold key information that may help investigators learn about what happened to the jet. While it is almost impossible for the data stored in the recorder to have survived for so long under such great depths of the ocean, Seabed Constructor has a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) capable of retrieving the recorder.

Seabed Constructor is committed to a 90-day search.

While families of those on board the missing jet remain hopeful about the latest search, Darren Chester, Australia’s minister for infrastructure and transport, said in a statement in October that he was "conscious of not raising hopes for the loved ones of those on board... I hope that this new search will bring answers, both for the next of kin and for the rest of the world.”

Meanwhile, Blaine Gibson, the independent wreckage hunter searching for the missing plane, Sunday said he was confident the plane will be found.

"I believe firmly that this mystery will be solved," Gibson told Australia’s ABC news network. "That we will eventually know what happened on the plane. That may come very soon... If the Inmarsat data and its interpretation are correct I'm confident that Ocean Infinity will find it."

Over the last three years, Gibson found at least 20 pieces of wreckage confirmed or deemed likely to have come from the missing plane, among them the right wing flaperon, right aft flap and right outboard flap.