Can prediction markets find missing MH370?

Confronting uncertainty.

For more than a decade, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has occupied a strange place in the modern imagination: a wound that has never closed. A plane with 239 people on board does not simply vanish in the 21st century, or at least it shouldn’t. And yet it did!

Now, once again, the southern Indian Ocean is being searched.

A quiet, highly technical operation is underway, led by Ocean Infinity, under a renewed “no-find, no-fee” agreement with the Malaysian government. Its vessel, Armada 86 05, is deploying autonomous underwater vehicles capable of descending nearly 20,000 feet, scanning the seabed with sonar, magnetometers, and high-resolution 3D mapping. The target zone, around 5,800 square miles, has been refined using years of accumulated analysis.

There are no dramatic press conferences this time, no daily briefings. Just machines slipping silently into black water, searching terrain no human will ever see.

What we know, and what we still don’t

MH370 disappeared on 8 March 2014, forty minutes after take-off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing. Military radar later showed the Boeing 777 deviating sharply from its planned route, flying south for hours into one of the most remote regions on Earth. Satellite data confirmed continued flight, but not where it ended, or why.

The largest multinational search in aviation history followed, at enormous cost. It failed to locate the main wreckage or flight recorders. And yet the evidence is no longer a blank page.

A flaperon, part of a wing control surface, was recovered on Réunion Island in 2015 and identified by investigators as almost certainly originating from MH370. Additional fragments, judged “very likely” to be from the aircraft, later washed up along the East African coast and Indian Ocean islands. Oceanographers refined drift models. Satellite analysts revisited the data again and again. The picture narrowed, even if it never snapped fully into focus.

This is where MH370 now sits: not in a fog of ignorance, but in a haze of probability.

Why this search feels different

Ocean Infinity has been here before. A 2018 seabed search came up empty. An earlier phase of this renewed effort was paused due to weather. Scepticism is not only understandable; it is rational. What has changed is not just technology, but synthesis.

The current search area reflects years of accumulated judgment across disciplines: aviation, satellite communications, oceanography, wreck recovery. It is, in effect, the best collective guess we can now make about where the aircraft lies.

And that brings me back to an idea I first explored in this context nearly ten years ago.

The problem of the “lone expert”

We like to imagine breakthroughs coming from a single decisive insight: the brilliant analyst, the overlooked data point, the final piece of the puzzle. But MH370 resists that narrative. No single expert, model, or dataset has been enough.

In problems like this, where uncertainty is vast and information fragmented, history suggests a different approach can work better: aggregating judgment.

In 1968, when the US Navy submarine USS Scorpion was lost, the search area was overwhelming. Instead of relying on one authoritative theory, experts were asked to make independent probabilistic assessments. When those assessments were combined, the wreck was found within a few hundred metres of the predicted location. The lesson is not mystical. It is practical. Groups of informed people, when aggregated properly, can outperform even the best individual experts.

In a sense, Ocean Infinity’s search already embodies this idea. But it does so informally, behind closed doors. A structured mechanism, such as a carefully designed prediction market restricted to qualified experts, can help surface neglected hypotheses, test assumptions, and dynamically re-weight search priorities as new information emerges.

This is not about “betting” in some probability exercise on tragedy. It is about recognising that uncertainty itself can be measured, and that human judgment, when pooled intelligently, is a tool rather than a weakness. The wisdom of the crowd is often greater than even its strongest member.

Confronting uncertainty

For the families and friends of the 239 people on board, this search is about being able to say, finally, this is where they are. It is about burial, mourning, and the end of limbo. For the rest of us, MH370 is a reminder of something deeply unsettling: that even in an age of satellites, big data, and constant connectivity, parts of the world, and parts of our systems, remain frighteningly opaque.

If Ocean Infinity succeeds, it will be a triumph of persistence and engineering. If it fails, the story should not end in resignation. The question then becomes not “why didn’t we look harder?”, but “did we think hard enough about how we look at all?”

The challenge is a great one – it is about how we should confront uncertainty, share knowledge, and search together when no one has the full answer.

And that question, unlike the aircraft, has never really disappeared.