In this Tuesday, April 8, 2014, photo, a relative of passengers onboard the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 that vanished exactly one month ago, waits for a briefing to start at a conference room of a hotel in Beijing.
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An American who discovered an aircraft part in Mozambique that may be from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 says he initially thought it was part of a much smaller plane.
Mr Gibson found a piece of suspected MH370 wreckage measuring 130 centimetres by 55 centimetres on a sandbank of the Mozambique Channel, which separates Mozambique from Madagascar.
That an American adventurer could be the one to help crack one of aviation’s greatest mysteries came as no shock to his friends, who say they aren’t surprised Blaine Gibson’s passion for mysteries, travel and meeting people would bring him to the Mozambique coast in search of clues about the missing Malaysia Airlines flight.
Investigators hope that once the part arrives, they will be able to confirm whether or not the piece is from Flight 370 within a matter of days, Dolan said.
The new piece of debris is now in the hands of Mozambique civil aviation authorities and is expected to be sent to Australia this coming week to be examined.
The 58-year-old lawyer from Seattle said he was cautious about the possibility that the part is from the missing Boeing 777 because three large jets had crashed in the area before. “Malawi was number 176, Mozambique was number 177”, he said.
Gibson said the discovery happened after he made a decision to go “somewhere exposed to the ocean” on the last day of a trip to the Mozambican coastal town of Vilankulo.
The location of the debris matches investigators’ theories about where wreckage from the plane would have ended up, Australian officials said. An ongoing search of the southern Indian Ocean has found no trace of the plane, though a wing part from the aircraft washed ashore on Reunion Island previous year.
Be proactive – Use the “Flag as Inappropriate” link at the upper right corner of each comment to let us know of abusive posts. Pattiaratchi has used computer modeling to predict where floating debris might end up and Gibson wanted to get Pattiaratchi’s opinion on where to look. “But at this stage, we have no conclusive evidence as to what it is or where it comes from”, ATSB chief commissioner Martin Dolan said Friday, quoted by NBC News.
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