There are calls for a new search to be launched for the Malaysia Airlines plane which vanished in March 2014
A former navy officer has called for a fresh search to be launched for missing flight MH370 after a fisherman claimed he found a jet plane wing at sea.
It’s been almost 10 years since the Malaysia Airlines flight completely disappeared with 239 people on board on March 8, 2014 but the wreckage site has never been found.
Last month, retired Australian fisherman Kit Olver revealed that his deep-sea trawler attempted to recover what appeared to be the wing of a commercial airliner seven months after the flight vanished.
The 77-year-old said he informed the authorities of the GPS coordinates of his bombshell discovery at the time and then again three years later, to no avail.
He only spoke out about it publicly two weeks ago, prompting underwater expert and ex-navy officer Peter Waring to rekindle pleas for a new search to be carried out.
‘An entire wing is large and would have had a far different drift profile than the pieces of debris that turned up in Africa… so it’s plausible,’ Mr Waring told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Mr Waring was part of the joint agency team formed by the Australian government alongside Chinese and Malaysian authorities to carry out the most extensive ever search at sea for the doomed flight.
Retired fisherman Kit Olver said he found a commercial plane wing 34 miles off the south coast of Australia in October 2014 but the authorities have never acted on his discovery
Mr Olver said he found the wing 34 miles west of the South Australian town of Robe and Mr Waring believes that aligns with theories that some of the fuselage could wash up in Australia.
‘It was a bloody great wing of a big jet airliner,’ Mr Olver said. ‘I’ve questioned myself. I’ve looked for a way out of this.
‘I wish to Christ I’d never seen the thing… but there it is. It was a jet’s wing.’
After struggling all day to free the huge object from the net, Mr Olver ordered his crew to cut it free and let it drift.
Mr Olver, 77, said he has told the authorities the GPS coordinates of where he discovered the wing
George Currie, who is the only other surviving member of the crew on the trawler, known as Vivienne Jane, backed up the claims made by Mr Olver.
‘It was incredibly heavy and awkward. It stretched out the net and ripped it. It was too big to get up on the deck,’ he said.
‘As soon as I saw it I knew what it was. It was obviously a wing, or a big part of it, from a commercial plane. It was white, and obviously not from a military jet or a little plane.’
Reading over Mr Olver’s account with fascination, Mr Waring said that if the seasoned fisherman could pinpoint accurate coordinates, then authorities could find and complete a search within days.
There are several theories over the route flight MH370 could have taken after contact with the plane was lost (Picture: Metro.co.uk)
‘Even at the time of the search, we had conversations about it, and we were certainly not closed off to the possibility of things washing up in Australia,’ he said.
‘And if it did wash up somewhere in Australia, it was more likely to be in Tasmania, or if it circled back around, somewhere off South Australia.’
What happened to flight MH370? The wildest conspiracy theories
Based on the data available, most experts believe that flight MH370 diverted off course and headed south shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, before crashing somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
Exactly how and why it ended up crashing has never been proved, but there have been some wild conspiracy theories over the years. Here’s a look at some of them.
The wreckage was found on Google Maps years ago
A man claimed to have found the missing plane six years ago (Picture: Google)
One man sensationally claimed he found the wreckage of the missing flight on Google Maps in 2018.
Ian Wilson believes a blurry outline of an aircraft spotted in the Cambodian jungle is in fact the same plane.
‘I was on there (Google), a few hours here, a few hours there,’ he said. ‘If you added it up I spent hours searching for places a plane could have gone down.
‘And in the end, you can see the place where the plane is.’
The pilot crashed the plane on purpose
An independent group working on the case claimed the pilot of the aircraft ‘deliberately depressurised the cabin’ to ‘slowly kill everyone on board’.
They claim that Zaharie Ahmed Shah then purposely crashed the plane into the Indian Ocean, either by waiting for the jet to run out of fuel or deliberately nose-diving it into the water.
Researcher claims she found wreckage – but no one listened to her
Cyndi Henry says she located the crashed plane years ago (Picture: Netflix)
Search volunteer Cyndi Hendry claims she found flight MH370 years ago but was never taken seriously.
Ms Hendry is adamant the plane crashed thousand of miles from the main search area off the coast of Vietnam.
After scouring satellite images, she believes she located the wreckage not far from where it went missing after coming across the letter ‘M’ on a piece of debris.
She said the shape was an ‘almost perfect match’ to the lettering that would have been on the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.
Sea creatures hold the key
Scientists believe they could use sea creatures to crack the case (Picture: Manan Vatsyayana/AFP via Getty Images)
In August 2023, scientists claimed that the answer to one of the ocean’s biggest mysteries lies in the shells of barnacles.
Researchers at the University of South Florida who found a method to extract ocean temperature records from the shells believe they can reconstruct the drift path of barnacles on the debris back to the original crash site.
Geoscientist professor Gregory Herbert said: ”The flaperon was covered in barnacles and as soon as I saw that, I immediately began sending emails to the search investigators because I knew the geochemistry of their shells could provide clues to the crash location.’
Cockpit fire, mass hypoxia or shot down
The theories are rife about MH370 and if you dig deep enough, you can find an array of possibilities.
Others include the idea that there was a fire in the cockpit, which led the pilots to lose both contact and control of the plane before it crashed.
Another is that the cabin lost oxygen and everyone on board was suffocated as the pilots looked for somewhere to perform an emergency landing – and ultimately crashed before they were able to land safely.
Some have even suggested the plane was shot down by US armed forces. The island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean is home to a US military base and theories suggest that flight MH370 was heading towards it on some sort of kamikaze mission but was secretly shot down and the evidence cleared before anyone else could get to it.
Small parts and debris confirmed to be from flight MH370, which was supposed to fly to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, have been recovered in various places over the last decade.
A wing flaperon and several other pieces washed up on the French island of Réunion, off Africa’s eastern coast, thousands of miles west of the search zone, while debris was also found further west on the coast of Mozambique.
Following the most expensive – yet fruitless – search in aviation history, experts have widely concluded that the plane turned south from its scheduled course and plunged somewhere into the southern Indian Ocean.
Mr Waring now suspects that Australian and international authorities placed too much emphasis on a drift modelling theory during the initial search phases that was based on ‘inexact science’.
The missing Malaysia Airlines aircraft (Picture: Wiki)
He said it failed to consider fully the idea that the direction of debris could be influenced by severe weather conditions, which could have caused parts to wash up in all manner of places.
‘Something as big as a wing would have had a distinctly different drift pattern to smaller bits of debris,’ he said.
The ex-military officer is not the only one calling for the MH370 hunt to be reignited.
Aerospace expert Jean-Luc Marchand and pilot Patrick Blelly, who believe the plane was deliberately hijacked by an experienced pilot, say new technology means a fresh search area could be plotted out and investigated within 10 days.
‘We have done our homework. We have a proposal … the area is small and considering new capabilities it will take 10 days,’ Mr Marchand said last September.
‘It could be a quick thing. Until the wreck of MH370 is found, nobody knows (what happened). But, this is a plausible trajectory.’
Mr Olver said he was told by an official a few hours after he’d reported the suspected wing discovery that it was likely a container that had fallen from a Russian ship in the area.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority claims it has no record of his call, but Mr Olver said he’s now at least cleared his own conscience by going public.
‘That’s it. I’ve told my point of view,’ he told Daily Mail Australia. ‘Anything else that I could come up with would be conjecture or supposition or my idea and I’m not really interested.
‘Whether it’s believed or acted on is out of my hands.’
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