Fisherman’s ‘plausible’ wing find triggers new push to solve MH370 mystery

A former naval officer involved in the initial hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has called for an investigation into an Australian fisherman’s claims he found a large piece of a commercial plane at sea.

Retired Australian fisherman Kit Olver last month said that in October 2014 – just seven months after the plane disappeared – his deep-sea trawler pulled up what appeared to be the wing of an airliner about 55 kilometres west of the South Australian town of Robe.

Kit Olver with the trawler he once owned.

“It was a bloody great wing of a big jet airliner,” Olver told this masthead. “I’ve questioned myself; I’ve looked for a way out of this. I wish to Christ I’d never seen the thing … but there it is. It was a jet’s wing.”

Underwater surveyor Peter Waring – an expert in surveying and mapping sea floors who was brought in to help with the initial search for MH370 in 2014 – said the claim was worthy of a new investigation.

Waring said he read Olver’s account with fascination. If the seasoned fisherman could pinpoint accurate co-ordinates, then authorities could find and complete a search within days, he said.

“An entire wing is large and would have had a far different drift profile than the pieces of debris that turned up in Africa … so it’s plausible,” said Waring.

Flight MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014 – en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing – with 239 passengers and crew on board.

Most authorities have concluded that the plane turned south from its scheduled course and came down somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean – thousands of kilometres west of where Olver claims to have found the wing. Despite the most expensive sea search in history and the discovery of several bits of debris, the plane’s final resting place remains a mystery.

Waring was part of the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, an Australian government agency formed with Chinese and Malaysian authorities to search for the plane.

Peter Waring was assigned to the team searching for MH370 wreckage.

He was involved with the search crew in 2015 when the first piece of debris, a wing flaperon, was discovered washed up on the French island of Reunion, off Africa’s eastern coast, thousands of kilometres west of the search zone. Several other pieces of the plane have since been found on Reunion and further west on the coast of Mozambique.

Waring said Olver’s claim fit with some theories about where the fuselage could be.

“Even at the time of the search, we had conversations about it, and we were certainly not closed off to the possibility of things washing up in Australia,” Waring said.

“And if did in wash up somewhere in Australia, it was more likely to be in Tasmania, or if it circled back around, somewhere off South Australia.”

Olver said he had tried to raise his discovery with search authorities in 2014 and again three years later, to no avail.

Waring, who hosted the podcast The Search for MH370 – Deepest Dive with journalist Jana Wendt, now suspects Australian and international authorities put too much emphasis on a drift modelling theory during the initial search phases.

He said the theory was based on an “inexact science” that failed to put enough weight on the possibility that the direction of debris could be influenced by catastrophic weather conditions.

“Something as big as a wing would have had a distinctly different drift pattern to smaller bits of debris,” he said.

Waring said it was not unreasonable that parts of the wreckage could have floated east due to strong weather systems that blew through after the crash.

He now believes that the crash site was further south than the main search zone, in a remote area known as Geelvinck Fracture Zone.

Waring is not the only one calling for the hunt to be resumed.

Aerospace expert Jean-Luc Marchand and pilot Patrick Blelly, who suspect the plane was deliberately hijacked by an experienced pilot, say new technology means a fresh search area could be canvassed and investigated within 10 days.

They recently urged the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), Malaysian government and exploration company Ocean Infinity – which led the search for MH370 – to look anew.

The Malaysian government has also faced mounting pressure from the victims’ families to reopen the search.

But the prospect of any new search is complicated: the Australian government has had no formal or active role in search efforts for the missing aircraft since the international search ceased in 2017, and now directs inquiries to Malaysia’s Civil Aviation Authority.

Olver said he tried to alert authorities of his find soon after returning to port, phoning the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

The authority said this week it had no record of corresponding with Olver during that period. Olver said he also contacted Ocean Infinity but received no reply.

When contacted by this masthead this week, Olver said he had not heard from Australian or Malaysian authorities since going public with his story.

The ATSB said it had not been involved in the search since 2017, and had not been notified of Olver’s discovery – and was therefore unable to comment on it.

However, the ATSB published a report in 2017 discussing debris that had washed up on Australian shores, noting media reporting of MH370 had been extensive, prompting many members of the public to look for and report any debris found on Australian beaches.

“All reported finds were assessed, but none were confirmed as originating from MH370,” the report said.

The Civil Aviation Authority of Malaysia did not respond to a request for comment.

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