MH370 Update: Search For Missing Plane To End On May 29

The Malaysian government announced Tuesday they would be terminating the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 on May 29. The aircraft disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 2014 with 239 passengers on board and has not been found since.

“This morning I raised this in Cabinet and agreed to extend to May 29,” Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke Siew Fook told reporters. When he was asked if it was the last extension that the contract will be allowed, the minister replied in the affirmative.

The decision came after Malaysia’s newly elected Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad announced in his first cabinet meeting since taking office on May 23 that the contract to find the jet is under review. This was in keeping with Mohamad's agenda to check government spending.

"We want to know what is the necessity for this, and if we find that it is not necessary, we will not renew," Mahathir said. "We may terminate it if it's not useful."

Back in January, the Malaysian government approved as much as $70 million in governmental funding for Ocean Infinity — a Canada-based company which has been searching for flight MH370 since its disappearance — if it manages to solve what has become the biggest mystery in modern aviation.

After the Malaysian aircraft vanished into thin air on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, the case has peaked both national and international interest. Since then, Ocean Infinity has already scanned 86,000 square kilometers (around 33,204 square miles) of seabed in the southern Indian Ocean, including the area investigators have claimed was the aircraft's most likely resting place, in vain.

"We are approaching the end of the current search, and the weather also soon becomes a limiting factor, but we're currently maximizing our efforts whilst we can," a representative for Ocean Infinity told the Strait Times.

Earlier month, some aviation experts appeared on Australia’s current affairs program “60 Minutes,” claiming Captain Zaharie Amad Shah, who flew MH370 the day it disappeared, deliberately crashed the flight in a premeditated murder-suicide.

This theory was backed by the show’s panel, consisting of Larry Vance, a former senior investigator with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, Captain John Cox renowned aviation safety expert, and Martin Dolan, former Chief Commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.

“This was planned, this was deliberate, and it was done over an extended period of time,” Dolan said.

The experts added he pilot deliberately took the plane to the remotest part of Indian Ocean to make it “disappear” because he had already made up his mind about “was killing himself.”

The theory of murder-suicide was floated days after John Dawson, a lawyer who represented nine families from MH370 and MH17, told News Corp Australia: “In MH370, you have the pilot flying between Malaysia and Beijing who turns back the aircraft. The evidence is so heavily weighted to involvement by one of the aircrew taking this aircraft down... That aircraft has probably depressurized, the people died of asphyxiation, it was premeditated murder."

However, the theory was disputed by Peter Foley from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, on the very facts that Shah had to be conscious at the end of the flight to carry out “controlled ditching” into the sea.

“Most of the people out there are speculating about a long period of depressurization after the transponder went off,” he said, the Guardian reported. “[They say] this may have been as long as an hour.”

“What they fail to understand is that while you don an oxygen mask and prevent the worst of the hypoxia situation, you are flying an aircraft at 40,000 feet. You are taking an aircraft from sea level to Mt Kosciuszko in 20 minutes, then you are talking it, over the course of a couple of minutes, to the height of Mt Everest plus 1,000 feet. You’ll get decompression sickness too,” Foley added.