Gibson, who is from Seattle, said the piece of debris is now in the hands of civil aviation authorities in Mozambique, and that he expects it to be transferred to their Australian counterparts.
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“The location of the debris is consistent with drift modeling commissioned by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau and reaffirms the search area for MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean”, according to a statement given to Reuters by Australian Minister for Infrastructure and Transport Darren Chester.
A white, meter-long chunk of metal was found off the coast of Mozambique earlier this week by a United States adventurer who has been carrying out an independent search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
Officials got a rare boost in July when a piece of the plane’s wing washed up on Reunion Island on the other side of the Indian Ocean.
The families of 12 passengers aboard missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 filed suits against the airline on Friday before a two-year deadline for legal action expires.
Earlier on Wednesday, Malaysia’s transport minister said there was a “high possibility” the piece belonged to a Boeing 777, the same make as missing flight MH370.
The American amateur investigator who found the washed-up debris on a sandbank in Mozambique told AFP that experts must be “cautious” about identifying the piece. Dolan says crews still have a big chunk of ocean to scour – around 30,000 square kilometers (11,500 square miles) – and he remains relatively confident the plane lies somewhere within that patch.
“The investigation team from the Malaysian Civil Aviation Department and MAS as well as the special investigation team on MH370 will be sent to Australia for the identification process”, he told reporters here yesterday.
He said that he had come to Mozambique as part of a dream to see every country in the world. “We’re working with officials in Mozambique and Malaysia to investigate”.
“In the event the aircraft is found and is accessible, Australia, Malaysia, and China have agreed to plans for recovery activities, including securing all the evidence necessary for the accident investigation”, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) reiterated in a weekly update of the search.
Now you know it is Reunion, then it is Mozambique, so the next country down the track could possibly be South Africa.
Analysis of exchanges between the plane’s engine and a satellite showed the plane flew south on a straight path during its final hours, suggesting it was on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed into the water.
The plane, which disappeared after inexplicably diverting from its planned Kuala Lumpur-Beijing route, had mostly Chinese, Malaysian and Australian passengers on board.
The theories and speculations around the fate of the aircraft had left passengers’ kin “deeply unsettled”, and with the deadline nearing, hope to determine the exact cause was also fast dissipating, said Voice 370, a coalition of MH370 kin.
“Voice 370 urges authorities to press on and search on in the current search area”, it said, stressing that winding down the expensive, two-year operation was “unacceptable”.
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With the search tentatively scheduled to wrap up in June, Flight 370 may become one of aviation’s great unsolved mysteries.
