Featured Image Credit: National Geographic
Topics: News, World News, Travel, Australia
Kit Roberts
A retired fisherman claims that he discovered a piece of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
The infamous plane went missing on March 8, 2014 with 227 passengers and 12 crew on board.
Despite one of the largest maritime searches in history, no wreckage of the missing flight was ever found and it seemingly vanished without a trace.
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But retired fisherman Kit Olver from Australia claims that he found part of the wreckage just a few months after the plane first went missing.
Kit says that his deep sea trawler pulled up part of what he believes to be a wing from an airliner.
When the wing emerged Kit, who had previously held a pilot's licence, realised that it was too big to belong to a private jet or smaller plane.
It was so big that he was unable to get it onboard his boat, but he remembered the location, and reported the find to the authorities.
Ultimately he was forced to cut the net loose or it could have become a danger to the boat.
Describing the wing, he said it was a 'bloody great wing of a big jet airliner'.
Now aged 77, Kit spoke up about how the discovery has haunted him since.
He told the Sydney Morning Herald: “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.”
He added: “This thing was much bigger than anything in the private plane category.”
George Currie worked as a first mate on several of Kit's boats over 20 years.
Describing the day the wing was found, he said: “You’ve got no idea what trouble we had when we dragged up that wing.
“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 added: “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. It took us all day to get rid of it.”
In 2017 Kit wrote to Ocean Infinity, a company undertaking a new search to locate the missing wreckage.
In the email he explained that no further interest had been shown in the discovery at the time.
This was because flight MH370 is thought to have gone down in the Southern Indian Ocean, hundreds of miles from where Kit and his crew found the wing.
He was also told initially that a shipping container had gone missing in the area, and it may have been that.
Nonetheless, Kit wrote: "I have trawled for 35 years and this was not a shipping container.
"Having over the years trawled up all sorts of objects, including aircraft, I am convinced this was an aircraft wing."
While it's not clear whether this discovery did belong to the missing flight, it certainly raises some big questions.