A former naval officer has called for a new search for missing flight MH370 after a fisherman claimed he had found a plane wing at sea.
It’s been almost a decade since the Malaysia Airlines plane disappeared completely on March 8, 2014 with 239 people on board, but the wreck site has never been found.
Last month, retired Australian fisherman Kit Olver revealed that his deep-sea trawler had attempted to recover the wing of a commercial airliner, seven months after the flight disappeared.
The 77-year-old said he gave authorities the GPS coordinates of his bomb discovery three years later, but to no avail.
He spoke about it publicly just two weeks ago, prompting underwater expert and former naval officer Peter Waring to reopen the case for a new search.
“A whole wing is large and would have had a very different drift profile to the pieces of debris that have turned up in Africa… so it’s plausible,” Mr Waring told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Mr Waring was part of the joint team formed by the Australian government along with Chinese and Malaysian authorities to conduct the most extensive maritime search ever for the doomed flight.
Mr Olver said he found the wing 90 kilometers west of the South Australian town of Robe and Mr Waring believes this is consistent with theories that part of the fuselage may have washed up in Australia.
“It was a damn big wing of a big jet,” Mr. Olver said. “I asked myself. I looked for a way out.
“I wish I’d never seen that thing… but there it is. It was the wing of a fighter jet.”
After struggling all day to free the huge object from the net, Mr. Olver orders his crew to cut it loose and let it float.
George Currie, the only surviving member of the trawler’s crew, known as Vivienne Jane, backed Mr Olver’s claims.
“It was incredibly difficult and uncomfortable. He reached out and tore the net. It was too big to be on the deck,” he said.
“As soon as I saw it, I knew what it was. It was clearly a wing or large portion of a commercial aircraft. It was white and clearly did not come from a military jet or small aircraft.”
Mr Waring read Mr Olver’s story with fascination and said that if the experienced fisherman could determine the precise coordinates, authorities could find and complete the search within days.
“Even at the time of the search we had discussions about it and we were by no means closed to the possibility that something could happen in Australia,” he said.
“And if it washed up somewhere in Australia, it was more likely to be in Tasmania, or, if it circled again, somewhere near South Australia.”
What happened to flight MH370? The wildest conspiracy theories
Based on available data, most experts believe that Flight MH370 veered off course shortly after takeoff from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and flew south before crashing somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
Exactly how and why it crashed has never been proven, but there have been some wild conspiracy theories over the years. Here are some.
A man sensationally claimed he found the wreckage of the missing 2018 flight on Google Maps.
Ian Wilson believes the blurry outline of a plane spotted in the Cambodian jungle is actually the same plane.
“I was there (Google), a few hours here, a few hours there,” he said. “If you add it all up, I spent hours looking for places where a plane may have crashed.
“And at some point you can see where the plane is.”
An independent group investigating the case claimed that the plane’s pilot had “deliberately depressurized the cabin” to “slowly kill everyone on board.”
They allege that Zaharie Ahmed Shah then deliberately crashed the plane into the Indian Ocean, either by waiting for the plane to run out of fuel or by deliberately submerging it in water.
Search assistant Cyndi Hendry claims she found flight MH370 years ago, but was never taken seriously.
Ms Hendry is convinced the plane crashed thousands of miles from the main search area off the coast of Vietnam.
After searching satellite images, she believes she found the wreckage not far from where it disappeared after finding the letter “M” on a piece of rubble.
She said the shape matched “almost perfectly” the letters found on the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.
In August 2023, scientists claimed that the answer to one of the ocean’s greatest mysteries lay in the shells of barnacles.
University of South Florida researchers who have found a way to extract sea temperature data from the shells believe they can reconstruct the barnacles’ drift path on the debris back to the original crash site.
Geoscientist Professor Gregory Herbert said: “The flaperon was covered in barnacles and when I saw this I immediately started sending emails looking for investigators as I knew the geochemistry of the shells could provide clues to the crash site.”
Theories surrounding MH370 are widespread and if you dig deep enough you can find a number of possibilities.
Others believe that a fire broke out in the cockpit, causing the pilots to lose both contact and control of the plane before the crash.
Another reason is that the cabin lost oxygen and everyone on board suffocated as the pilots looked for a place to make an emergency landing – and ultimately crashed before they could land safely.
Some have even suggested that the plane was shot down by US forces. There is a US military base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Theories suggest that flight MH370 flew there as part of some sort of kamikaze mission, but was secretly shot down and the evidence removed before anyone else could get there.
Small parts and debris confirmed to be from Flight MH370, which was scheduled to fly from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, have been recovered from various locations over the past decade.
A wing flaperon and several other pieces washed up on the French island of Réunion, off the east coast of Africa, thousands of kilometers west of the search area, while debris was also found further west on the coast of Mozambique.
After the most expensive – but unsuccessful – search in aviation history, experts have largely concluded that the plane veered south from its planned course and ended up somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean.
Mr Waring now suspects that Australian and international authorities placed too much emphasis on a drift modeling theory based on “inaccurate science” in the early stages of the search.
He said the idea that the direction of the debris could be affected by severe weather and pieces washing up in different places had not been sufficiently taken into account.
“Something as large as a wing would have had a significantly different drift pattern than smaller pieces of debris,” he said.
The ex-soldier is not the only one calling for a resumption of the hunt for MH370.
Aviation and space expert Jean-Luc Marchand and pilot Patrick Blelly, who believe the plane was deliberately hijacked by an experienced pilot, say new technologies make it possible to designate and investigate a new search area within ten days.
“We have done our homework. “We have a proposal… the area is small and given the new possibilities it will take ten days,” Mr Marchand said last September.
“It can happen quickly.” Until the wreckage of MH370 is found, no one will know what happened. But that is a plausible development.”
Mr. Olver said that a few hours after the suspected discovery of the wing was reported, an official told him it was likely a container that had fallen from a Russian ship in the area.
Australia’s Maritime Safety Authority claims there is no record of his call, but Mr Olver said he had at least cleared his conscience by coming forward.
‘That is it. I have made my point,” he told Daily Mail Australia. “Anything else I can think of would be a hunch or an assumption or my idea, and I’m not really interested.
“Whether I believe it or act on it is not in my hands.”
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Source: Metro
Source: Metro
I am Jack Morton and I work in 24 News Recorder. I mostly cover world news and I have also authored 24 news recorder. I find this work highly interesting and it allows me to keep up with current events happening around the world.
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