An American lawyer and blogger who has been running a private search for the missing Malaysian airliner MH370 has emerged as the finder of what appears to be a piece of wreckage from the aircraft.
Blaine Alan Gibson, 58, from Seattle, has been scouring islands and beaches around the Indian Ocean for the past year at his own expense in a personal quest to solve what has become the world’s most expensive aviation hunt.
Now he may have provided a major breakthrough in the two-year search for MH370 which has cost Australia, Malaysia and China at least £90 million. He said that his heart was pounding when he made the discovery at the weekend in a small boat he had chartered to reach a remote sandbank on the Mozambique Channel separating the country from Madagascar.
The 1m piece of metal, believed to be part of a Boeing 777’s tail-mounted horizontal stabiliser, is being flown to Australia where it will be examined by aviation experts.
“I’ve been very involved in the search for Malaysia 370, just out of personal interest and in a private group — not in a for-profit way or journalistic way,” he told CNN yesterday.
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“I went for the one year commemoration in Kuala Lumpur and met some of the family members and families and it inspired me to keep on looking. I wanted to go to a place where debris washes ashore and remains undisturbed. I have been combing beaches for a year to find anything that looks like it could be from an airplane.
“It never occurred to me that I would find something like this here. It’s almost like a dream. I don’t know if it’s from 370 or another plane. Even if it’s not from 370, it raises awareness that people need to look for stuff on beaches.”
Australian authorities conducting the ocean floor search for MH370 released pictures of Mr Gibson’s find.
Darren Chester, Australia’s transport minister, said the location of the find was consistent with ocean drift modelling and reaffirmed the main underwater search area in the Indian Ocean about 1,120 miles southwest of Perth in Western Australia.
Liow Tiong Lai, Malaysia’s transport minister, said in a series of tweets that there was a “high possibility” that the wreckage was from the plane which disappeared travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 passengers and crew.
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Mr Gibson has been to Australia to speak with scientists who plot Indian Ocean currents. He found the piece of wreckage in the same region of the Indian Ocean where last year the only confirmed piece of debris from MH370 — a wing-mounted flaperon — was found by a local beachcomber on Reunion Island, a remote French territory.