BLAINE GIBSON/AFP/Getty Images If confirmed that the piece of tail section came from Flight 370, a small piece of the puzzle will have been found, but it might not be enough to help solve one of aviation’s greatest mysteries.
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The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 disappeared on March 8, 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, killing 239 people, including six Australians.
Dave Ryan, a Seattle attorney who befriended Gibson in law school, says Gibson travels a lot and had different business ventures around the globe. He attended events in Kuala Lumpur marking the first anniversary of the flight, and after meeting with families of missing passengers, he made a decision to pursue his own investigation.
American blogger Blaine Gibson reportedly discovered the three-foot-long debris fragment on the east African coast earlier this week. “But it is very hard, for any accident investigator, to affirm to which kind of airplane this part belongs”, said Abreu.
The location is “not even an island, it’s a sandbank in a unsafe area” that can only be reached by experienced mariners who know the waters, Manna said.
In the past Gibson has traveled to Siberia to investigate a meteor crash, Ethiopia to search for the lost ark and Central America to find out why the Maya civilization disappeared, according to New York Magazine.
These signals, or pings, turned out to be another false lead, when on May 28 a U.S. Navy official told CNN that authorities had come to believe the pings did not come from the onboard data or cockpit voice recorders but instead came from some other man-made source unrelated to the jetliner.
He also said the Civil Aviation of Malaysia is working with Australian counterparts to retrieve the debris.
Transport Minister Darren Chester of Australia, which is leading a vast oceanic search for wreckage, said the debris would be transferred to Australia to be examined by officials and experts, including from Boeing.
It remains a mystery as to what happened to the airliner.
Gibson said Saturday that it would be a “very lucky discovery” if the piece of aircraft he found on a sandbank off the coast of Mozambique is confirmed to be from the Malaysia Airlines jet that vanished two years ago.
Australian officials have seen photographs of the debris and have been in communication with Blaine Gibson, the American man who found the part, said Dan OMalley, a spokesman for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
“If somebody actually found it in the middle of the ocean while they were sailing and picked it up, I would say, ‘Well, that should have some barnacles, ‘” he said. But if its been on a beach, its basically been sandblasted.. Pattiaratchis models showed it would likely end up around Madagascar or Reunion Island, and possibly in the Mozambique Channel.
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.
On March 24, 2014, Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak in a statement officially declared that the final flight path of MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean.
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A spokesperson from the government’s Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) told Xinhua Thursday the piece of debris would be making its way to Australia so that investigators can take a closer look.
