Malaysia has approved a new search for the missing flight MH370, which vanished while travelling between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing with 239 people on board more than a decade ago.

The country’s cabinet authorised a “no find, no fee” contract with Ocean Infinity, a UK-based marine robotics company, to probe a 15,000 sq km area in the southern Indian Ocean.

If successful in the search, the firm will receive £56 million. But the wreckage and the missing black boxes would also help solve one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries.

It is now more than a decade since MH370 disappeared from air traffic controllers’ screens on March 8 2014, less than an hour after take-off. Friends and relatives of those on board have long been haunted by what happened to them.

Although debris believed to be part of the Boeing 777 plane has washed up on the shores of the Indian Ocean in the years since, extensive searches for the wreckage by the three nations involved – Malaysia, China and Australia – have so far proven futile.