A retired fisherman from Australia claims he found a large piece of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane MH370 near the country’s southern coast in 2014. Kit Olver, now 77, claims that authorities ignored this crucial discovery at the time.
The plane vanished on March 8, 2014, with 227 passengers and 12 crew members. Despite extensive searches, its wreckage has never been located. “I wish to Christ I’d never seen the thing … but there it is. It was a jet’s wing,” Olver said, in an interview with Sydney Morning Herald.
The Australian fisherman says that he pulled up a “bloody great wing of a big jet airliner” in September or October of 2014, just months after MH370 disappeared. He described it as larger than a private plane. Despite the crew’s efforts, the wing was too heavy to lift onto the vessel, and they were forced to cut the $20,000 net.
Olver claims he contacted the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) upon returning to port but received little interest. Authorities reportedly dismissed his find as part of a shipping container, likely fallen from a Russian ship. The retired fisherman insists he can provide the coordinates of where he found the wing. The discovery occurred around 55km west of Robe in South Australia, a secret trawling area for Olver.
Motivated to help the families of those on MH370, Olver has decided to come forward with his story. He said that he had questioned himself and wished he had never seen the wing, but he believed it was essential to share the information. The mystery of MH370 has baffled investigators and families for years. The wreckage has not been located despite numerous searches, including a $200 million joint underwater search by Australia, Malaysia, and China.
The plane’s disappearance has long been the subject of a host of theories — ranging from the credible to outlandish — including that veteran pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah had gone rogue. In 2016, Malaysian officials revealed the pilot had plotted a path over the Indian Ocean on a home flight simulator but stressed this did not prove he deliberately crashed the plane. A final report into the tragedy released in 2018 pointed to failings by air traffic control and said the course of the plane was changed manually. However, they failed to come up with any firm conclusions.
(With agency inputs)
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