Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: ‘Titanic’ Director James Cameron Won’t Help Search For Plane

The search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 — whose disappearance remains the greatest mystery in the history of aviation — has stalled as search vessels return to port to refuel after finding absolutely nothing in their hunt for any trace of the Boeing 777 and its 239 passengers and crew, that vanished on March 8 of 2014.

But one possible source of help in the frustrating search for Flight 370 has apparently backed out. Movie director James Cameron, the Hollywood bigshot who helmed the mega-hits Titanic and Avatar and who himself is an accomplished deep sea explorer, now has “zero interest” in contributing to the search effort, according to one unaffiliated MH370 researcher.

Cameron himself is a co-holder of the record for the deepest-ever deep sea dive, traveling in 2012 inside a specially designed scientific submarine to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a region in the western Pacific Ocean that, at 36,070 feet, is the deepest known region anywhere in the world — well over a mile deeper than Mount Everest is tall.

Last year, about a month after the Malaysia Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing suddenly disappeared without a trace, Cameron said that he believed he knew how to locate the plane, or whatever was left of it.

But Cameron’s solution hinged on what were then believed to be “pings” emanating from the missing Malaysia Airlines plane’s black box recorders. Those “pings” turned out to be unrelated to the missing plane.

Nonetheless, perhaps due to his interest in deep-water exploration, Cameron’s name has continued to surface in connection with the hunt for Flight MH370.

In addition to his plunge to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, Cameron made more than 30 dives to explore the wreckage of the Titanic about 12,500 feet (2.3 miles) deep in the North Atlantic Sea, and in 2002 dove nearly 16,000 feet into the Atlantic to explore the wreckage of the World War II German battleship Bismarck.

Last week, Bruce Roberston, an aviation expert who is one of many independent researchers attempting to locate the presumed wreckage of Malaysai Airlines Flight MH370, called for Cameron to become involved in the search, along with Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Paul Allen.

But according to another independent investigator, Andre Milne, Cameron is no longer interested in helping to find the missing plane, if he ever was.

“We asked Mr Cameron for help in the search effort whom thus far has shown zero interest in MH370,” Milne said, quote by Britain’s Express newspaper.

Milne has earlier proposed the theory that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 was headed toward the top-secret United States military base on Diego Garcia island as a “provocation,” but that theory has since been debunked. James Cameron has not publicly weighed in on the search for the missing plane since his initial comments more than a year ago.

[Images: PBS Screen Grab, Angela George/Wikimedia Commons]