A piece of debris found off the shore of Mozambique is believed to be a piece of MH370, the Malaysian airliner that disappeared two years ago.
An American tourist, Blaine Gibson, found the piece on a sandbank in the Mozambique Channel, the area between Mozambique and Madagascar. He found it in the same part of the Indian Ocean where another piece was found last July.
Photographs were given to investigators in Malaysia, Australia, and the United States. They concluded that the piece, presumably from a horizontal stabilizer skin, likely comes from a Boeing 777, the kind of airliner that disappeared.
Gibson had been helping officials in the search for MH370.
“It never occurred to me that I would find something like this here,” he said. “It’s almost like a dream. I don’t know if it’s from 370 or another plane. Whatever it is, even if it’s not from 370, it raises awareness that people need to look for stuff on beaches.”
We covered the plight of MH370 a year ago, when there was no evidence found of the airliner. Now, however, the efforts of Gibson and other civilian volunteers may finally have paid off. The piece, however, may yet be from another plane.
“I would expect to see this on many varieties of Boeing aircraft, not particular to a 777,” said Jared Young, vice president of research and development at LISI Aerospace.
Even so, one source reports that no Boeing 777s were missing at the time other than MH370. The appearance of the piece gives hope to those waiting to discover the fate of the passengers.
The piece “reaffirms the search area for MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean,” said Darren Chester, Australian minister for infrastructure and transport.
Boeing itself has declined to comment on the discovery, which occurred mere days before the second anniversary of the plane’s disappearance on March 8.
Featured image by Cory W. Watts, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
