More than 11 years after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished with all 239 people on board, a new search for its wreckage is set to be launched this month, the Malaysian government announced.

Malaysia's Ministry of Transport said in a news release on Dec. 3 that a deep-sea search will resume on Dec. 30 and last intermittently for 55 days. The U.S. company Ocean Infinity, which has led previous searches, will carry out the search in a "targeted area assessed to have the highest probability of locating the aircraft," the ministry said.

MH370 disappeared and is presumed to have crashed on March 8, 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to Beijing. Over the years, pieces of the plane have washed ashore, but the main wreckage was never found.

Austin-based Ocean Infinity previously searched for the plane in 2018. Malaysia announced in December 2024 that the company would search again, but the search was called off in April after a few weeks due to bad weather. Previous searches by multiple governments have also been fruitless.

Authorities didn't say exactly where the search would focus, but had been searching in the southern Indian Ocean. The Ministry of Transport said the search would be carried out under terms of a service agreement with Ocean Infinity from March. Malaysia will pay the firm $70 million if substantive wreckage is found, Reuters reported. Ocean Infinity declined to comment on the search plans.

What happened to the missing plane?

MH370 departed from the airport in Kuala Lumpur at about 12:41 a.m. on March 8, 2014, headed for Beijing, which should've been about a five-hour flight. Less than an hour into the flight, the Boeing 777-200ER plane stopped communicating with the ground, but no distress signal was ever sent.

Investigators believe the plane continued to fly for hours, and ultimately crashed in the Indian Ocean. Exactly what caused the plane to stop transmitting data and communications is unknown, but a report released in 2018 suggested the loss of communications could have been deliberately done by someone on board.

The plane carried more than 150 Chinese passengers, 50 Malaysian passengers and others from countries including France, Australia, Indonesia, India, the United States, Ukraine and Canada. No remains have been found.

Contributing: Greta Cross and Bart Jansen, USA TODAY; Reuters

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Search for missing Malaysia Airlines plane to resume this month

Reporting by Jeanine Santucci, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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