OAN’s Brooke Mallory
2:00 PM – Wednesday, December 20, 2023
After being disregarded by officials years ago, a 77-year-old fisherman claimed to have discovered a sizable chunk of the famous, missing Malaysia Airlines aircraft, MH370, off the coast of South Australia.
As the most costly ocean search in history, the plane carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members vanished on March 8th, 2014, leaving no trace of the missing debris.
Now, Australian fisherman Kit Olver has come forward for a second time to say that in “September or October” of 2014, after the airplane vanished, his deep-sea trawler picked up what he believed to be a commercial liner wing.
He also claims that the wing was a lot larger than a private jet wing and referred to it as a “bloody great wing of a big jet airliner.”
“I’ve questioned myself; I’ve looked for a way out of this,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald. “I wish to Christ I’d never seen the thing… but there it is. It was a jet’s wing.”
His fishing team had gone through much trouble in order to transport the wing, according to George Currie, the only other surviving member of the trawler crew who was present on the day of the discovery.
“It was incredibly heavy and awkward. It stretched out the net and ripped it. It was too big to get up on the deck,” he said. “As soon as I saw it, I knew what it was. It was obviously a wing, or a big part of it, from a commercial plane. It was white, and obviously not from a military jet or a little plane.”
The crew was forced to cut their $20,000 net since they could not get the aircraft piece onto their vessel.
More than nine years after finding the wing, Olver claims he can provide the location’s coordinates to the relevant authorities.
In South Australia, the alleged piece of the vessel was found around 34.17 miles west of the town of Robe. Olver said that he had chosen the region as his covert fish trawling location.
The 77-year-old also claims that as soon as he arrived back in port, he called the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA), but the agency showed very little interest in his findings. An official had informed him that he had most likely discovered “a portion of a cargo container” that had fallen off a Russian ship nearby.
However, the AMSA also informed the Sydney Morning Herald that they allegedly had no record of Olver’s call.
Olver, who is now retired and aging, claims that his desire to assist the families of those who were on board MH370 drove him to come out with his account a second time.
The plane is thought to have crashed in the Southern Indian Ocean, however, searches there have yielded no successful results.
Australia, Malaysia, and China also concluded a $200 million two-year cooperative undersea search that yielded no results in January 2017.
Back in 2014, flight MH370 left the country of Malaysia carrying 227 passengers from 14 countries, including 153 Chinese nationals and 12 crew members.
In response to Malaysian air traffic control, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah said, “…contact Ho Chi Minh (…) good night,” at around 5:20 p.m.
For some reason, radar detectors showed that the aircraft quickly went “dark” before reversing course and flying the wrong way over Malaysia.
The aircraft was observed flying back over the Malacca Strait and over the Indian Ocean, according to primary civilian and military radar data.
Aircraft communications sent to a nearby airport also showed that the MH370 had run out of fuel after around 7.5 hours, then crashed into the water around 11 minutes later, and was never recovered.
In the years that followed, some debris from the aircraft had been discovered as far away as Madagascar, 41 individual parts were located.
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