The team have just three months to find the aircraft, up to early April, as this is the windows when the southern Indian Ocean’s infamous bad weather eases enough for ships to remain at sea for longer periods.

Flight MH370 went missing in March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew on board during a flight from Kuala Lumpur and Beijing and despite a hunt for it at a cost of £80 million,the main body of the aeroplane has not been found.

Several pieces of aircraft debris have been recovered, but the passenger jet's final resting place remains a mystery.

Now a team involving Inmarsat, a London-based global satellite network, Boeing, Australian air accident investigators and an American exploration company that has leased the world's most advanced civilian ocean-survey ship, have joined forces to launch a new search.

The survey ship, which has a large helicopter landing pad, an array of spherical antennae, a recovery crane that can lift 250 tonnes rising from the stern and is equipped with a fleet of underwater drones, left Durban, South Africa, four days ago and is heading to the Indian Ocean.

Experts in London believe the wreckage of the plane is most likely lying along latitude 35 degree south, which is north of the previous search area at a depth of between 5-6 kilometres.

The ship is expected to start searching for the airliner in about 10 days.

Seabed Constructor's operators, the Houston-based sea-floor experts Ocean Infinity, have struck a deal with the Malaysian government that will earn them about $70 million, but only if they find the aircraft.

A formal deal is expected to be signed in a few days, according to The Times.

Ocean Infinity is confident it can find MH370 in 12 weeks despite the previous sea-bed search, led by the Australian government finding nothing.

Using studies commissioned by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which relied on more precise analysis of MH370's final hours obtained from sparse satellite data and Boeing flight simulators, there is expert consensus that the lost jet is within the new search zone.

That likelihood was boosted by the searchers' first big break — the discovery, 508 days after the aircraft vanished, of a large wing component, a barnacle covered flaperon, on a remote beach on the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean.

The Australian investigators obtained another 777 flaperon from Boeing and set it adrift to determine the speed and direction it moved in ocean currents.

Working backwards from where the piece was discovered, they found that it had almost certainly drifted west across the ocean to the island, from where the new search will be focused.

In addition to starting with much better intelligence, Ocean Infinity says it has a far better equipment than the previous search.

That relied primarily on cumbersome deep-tow sonars tethered to ships with cables up to 10km in length.

While reliable and able to transmit sea floor images in real time through the cables to experts on board the surface ships, the sonars worked laboriously, scanning only about 500 sq km of sea bed a day.

Seabed Constructor will search the seabed with six unmanned, untethered submarine-like search vehicles that can cover a combined 1,200 sq km of sea floor a day and travel to a depth of 6km.