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Over nine years and countless searches later, missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, with 239 people on board, still has not been found.
Numerous experts have studied Flight MH370 and come up with a wide variety of theories, but incredibly not a single one of them as panned out yet.
Now, a discovery by an Australian fisherman may finally have unlocked a real clue as to the missing plane’s whereabouts.
Retired Australian fisherman Kit Olver, 77, claims that in 2014 he was operating his deep-sea trawler in September or October of 2014 when he reeled in what he believed was a wing of a commercial airliner.
He was fishing about 55 kilometers (a little over 34 miles) off the southeast coast of South Australia, in the Southern Ocean – the same location area that has long been speculated to be where Flight MH370 went down.
“It was a bloody great wing of a big jet airliner,” he tells the Sydney Morning Herald.
“I’ve questioned myself; I’ve looked for a way out of this,” he says.
“I wish to Christ I’d never seen the thing … but there it is. It was a jet’s wing.”
Olver held a pilot’s license at the time of the discovery.
The fisherman’s revelation comes just as compensation hearings for Flight MH370 families are beginning in China.
George Currie, a member of the crew on the boat, corroborates Olver’s story.
“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 says.
“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.”
Due to its massive size the crew was unable to free the wing from the $20,000 net and were forced to cut it loose.
So whatever it was, it now sits in the shallow depth at the bottom of the ocean in that spot – 37 degrees, 16 minutes south and 139 degrees, 12 minutes east.
Olver claims he alerted the Australian Maritime Safety Authority about the wing when he returned to port, but they told him it must have been a shipping container that had fallen off a Russian ship in the area.
Three years later, because Flight MH370 still hadn’t been found, he sent the authorities an email.
“I have trawled for 35 years and this was not a shipping container,” he wrote. “Having over the years trawled up all sorts of objects, including aircraft, I am convinced this was an aircraft wing. Please feel free to contact me.”
Olver says no one ever responded.