1. Disappearance2. Coastal tramp3. Goldmine4. Conspiracies
The first piece found by Blaine Gibson, a fragment of the horizontal stabilizer, was discovered on a sandbar off the coast of Mozambique in February 2016. Author photo: Blaine Gibson (Blaine Gibson)3. Goldmine
The Indian Ocean washes tens of thousands of kilometers of coastline - the final result will depend on how many islands count. When Blaine Gibson began searching for wreckage, he had no plan. He flew to Myanmar, because he was going to go there anyway, and then went to the coast and asked the villagers what coast they usually put the things they lost in the sea. He was advised by several beaches, and one fisherman agreed to take him to the boat, there was some rubbish there, but nothing that would have to do with the plane. Then Gibson asked the locals to be on guard, left them his contact number and went on. Similarly, he visited the Maldives, and then the islands of Rodrigues and Mauritius, again not finding anything interesting on the coast. Then came July 29, 2015. Approximately 16 months after the plane went missing, a team of municipal workers who were cleaning the beach on the French island of Reunion, stumbled upon a
streamlined metal piece of more than one and a half meters in size, which seemed to have just been brought ashore.
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The team foreman, a man named Johnny Run, guessed that it could be a fragment of an airplane, but he had no idea which one. At first, he thought about making a memorial out of a wreck, setting it up on a lawn nearby and planting flowers around it, but instead he decided to report the find through a local radio station. The gendarme team that arrived at the scene took the debris with them, and it was soon identified as part of the Boeing 777. It was a fragment of the moving tail section of the wing, called flaperone, and subsequent examination of the serial numbers showed that
it belonged to MH370 .
This was a necessary material proof of assumptions based on electronic data. The flight ended tragically in the Indian Ocean, although the exact crash site remained unknown and was located somewhere thousands of kilometers east of Reunion. Families of missing passengers had to abandon the ghostly hope that their loved ones could be alive. No matter how soberly people evaluated the situation, the news of the discovery was a serious shock for them. Grace Nathan was devastated - according to her, she was barely alive for several weeks after the flaperone was discovered.
Gibson flew to Reunion and found Johnny Run on the same beach. The run was open and friendly - he showed Gibson the place where he found the flaperone. Gibson began to look out for other debris, but without much hope of success, because the French authorities had already conducted a search, and they were unsuccessful. Floating debris takes time to drift across the Indian Ocean, moving from east to west in the low southern latitudes, and the flaperone probably arrived before other debris, as parts of it could act above the water, acting as a sail.
A local newspaper journalist interviewed Gibson for a story about a visit by an independent American researcher to Reunion. On this occasion, Gibson specifically put on a T-shirt that says "
Look ." He then flew to Australia, where he spoke with two oceanographers, Charita Pattiaratchi from the University of Western Australia at Perth and David Griffin, who worked at a government research center in Hobart and was invited as a consultant to the Australian Transport Security Bureau, the leading organization in search activities MH370. Both men were experts on currents and winds in the Indian Ocean. In particular, Griffin spent years tracking the drifting buoys - he also attempted to simulate the complex characteristics of the flaperon drift on his way to Reunion, hoping to narrow the geographical scope of underwater exploration. It was easier to answer Gibson's questions: he wanted to know the most likely places for floating debris to appear on the shore. The oceanographer pointed to the northeast coast of Madagascar and, to a lesser extent, the coast of Mozambique.
Gibson chose Mozambique because he had not been there before and could have considered him his 177th country, and went to a city called Vilanculos, since it seemed relatively safe and there were good beaches. He arrived there in February 2016. According to his recollections, he again asked for advice from local fishermen, and they told him about a sandbank called Paluma — she lay behind a reef, and they were usually sent there to pick up nets and buoys brought by the waves of the Indian Ocean. Gibson paid a boatman named Suleman to take him to this sandbank. There they found all kinds of rubbish, mostly plastic. Suleman called Gibson, lifting a gray piece of metal about half a meter across, and asked: "Is this the 370th?" The debris had a cellular structure, and on one side was a stencilled inscription "NO STEP". At first, Gibson thought that this small piece was not related to a huge airliner. He says: “At a rational level, I was sure that this could not be a fragment of an airplane, but with my heart I felt that it was him. By that time, it was already time for us to sail back, and then we would have to touch on a personal story. Two dolphins swam to our boat and helped us get aground, and for my mother the dolphins were literally totem animals. When I saw these dolphins, I thought:
Still a piece of a plane . ”
This story can be interpreted differently, but Gibson was right. It was determined that the found fragment - a fragment of the stabilizer of horizontal tail - almost certainly belongs to MH370. Gibson flew to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, and handed over the find to the Australian consul. Then he flew to Kuala Lumpur, in time for the second anniversary of the tragedy, and this time he was met as a close friend.
In June 2016, Gibson turned his attention to the remote northeastern coast of Madagascar, which turned out to be a real gold mine. Gibson says that he found three fragments on the first day and two more in a few days. A week later, local residents brought him three more details found on a nearby beach, thirteen kilometers from the site of the first finds. Since then, the search did not stop, - went the rumors that for the wreckage of the MH370 reward is due. According to Gibson, he once paid $ 40 for one piece — it turned out so much that the whole village sufficed for drunkenness for a whole day. Apparently, the local rum is extremely inexpensive.
A lot of garbage, not related to the aircraft, was discarded. Nevertheless, Gibson was involved in finding about a third of the dozens of fragments that are today identified as unequivocally - or likely - or allegedly related to MH370. Some fragments are still under investigation. The influence of Gibson is so great that David Griffin, although grateful to him, is very concerned that the detection of fragments can now be statistically distorted in favor of Madagascar - perhaps due to more northern coastal zones. He called his consideration "the Gibson effect."
The fact remains - after five years no one succeeded in tracing the path of debris from the place where they were brought to land, to a point in the southern part of the Indian Ocean. In an effort to be open to new things, Gibson is still hoping to discover new fragments that will explain the disappearance — for example, charred wires pointing to a fire, or traces of shrapnel, indicating a missile hit — although what we know about the last hours of the flight is largely excludes such options. The wreckage found by Gibson confirms that the analysis of satellite data was correct. The plane flew for six hours, until the flight suddenly ended. The one who sat at the helm, did not try to gently sit on the water; on the contrary, the clash was monstrous. Gibson admits that there is still a chance to find something like a message in a bottle - a note of despair scrawled by someone in the last minutes of life. On the beaches, Gibson found several backpacks and many wallets, all of which were empty. According to him, the closest thing he found is an inscription on the inside of a baseball cap made in Malay. Translated, she read: “To the one who reads this. Dear friend, we will meet at the hotel. ”

Illustrations created by studio La Tigre(A) - 1:21, March 8, 2014:
Near the waypoint between Malaysia and Vietnam over the South China Sea, the MH370 disappears from the air traffic control radar and turns to the southwest, again passing over the Malay Peninsula.
(B) - about an hour later:
Having flown to the northwest over the Strait of Malacca, the plane performs the “last sharp turn”, as the researchers would later call it, and takes a course to the south. The turn itself and the new direction were restored by satellite data.
(C) - April 2014:
The search in surface waters is stopped, the search begins at depth. Analysis of satellite data shows that the last time the connection with the MH370 was established in the area of ​​the arc.
(D) - July 2015:
The first piece of MH370, flaperone, was found on Reunion Island. Other confirmed or probable fragments were found on beaches scattered in the western Indian Ocean (red spots).
4. Conspiracies
After the disappearance of MH370, three official investigations were launched. The first was the most ambitious, the most thorough and the most expensive: a technically difficult underwater search for Australians, whose goal was to detect the main wreckage, which would allow to get the data of black boxes and voice recorders. Search efforts included the determination of the technical condition of the aircraft, the analysis of radar and satellite data, the study of ocean currents, a good share of statistical studies, as well as the physical analysis of debris from East Africa, many of which were obtained from Blaine Gibson. All this required complex operations in one of the most turbulent seas of the world. Part of the effort was undertaken by a group of volunteers, engineers and scientists who met online, called themselves the Independent Group and showed such effective cooperation that the Australians took into account their work and officially thanked them for their assistance. In the history of the investigation of accidents this has never happened before. However, after more than three years of work, which cost about $ 160 million, the investigation in Australia ended unsuccessfully. In 2018, it was picked up by the American company Ocean Infinity, which concluded a contract with the Malaysian government on the terms “no result - no payment”. The search continued to use the most modern underwater vehicles and covered a previously unexplored section of the seventh arc, in which, in the opinion of the Independent Group, detection was most likely. After a few months, these efforts also ended in failure.
The second official investigation was conducted by the Malaysian police, and it was a thorough check of everyone who was on the plane, as well as their friends and relatives. It is difficult to assess the true extent of police discoveries, because the report on the results of the investigation was not published. Moreover, it was classified, becoming inaccessible even to other Malaysian researchers, but after someone organized the leak, its inferiority became apparent. In particular, all the information known about Captain Zachary was omitted in it - and this did not cause much surprise. The Prime Minister of Malaysia at the time was an unpleasant man named Najib Razak, who is believed to be deeply mired in corruption. The press in Malaysia was censored, the loudest were found and silenced. The officials had their own reasons for caution — from a career that was worth preserving to, perhaps, their lives. Obviously, it was decided not to delve into topics that could put Malaysia Airlines or the government in a bad light.
The third official investigation was the study of the accident, conducted not to make a decision on liability, but to identify the probable cause — it should have been conducted by an international group in accordance with the highest international standards. At the head was a special working group created by the Malaysian government, and from the very beginning there was a mess in it - the police and military considered themselves above this investigation and despised him, and the ministers and members of the government saw in him the risk to themselves. Foreign experts, who came to assist, began to run almost immediately after their arrival. One American expert, referring to the international aviation protocol regulating the investigation of incidents, described the situation as follows: “The ICAO“ Appendix 13 ”is intended to organize investigations in a confident democracy. For countries like Malaysia, with a shaky and autocratic bureaucracy, as well as for airlines owned by the state or perceived as a matter of national pride, it is hardly suitable. ”
One of those who watched the investigation process said: “It became clear that the main purpose of the Malaysians was to hush up this story. From the very beginning, they had an instinctive prejudice against being open and transparent - not because they had some deep, dark secret, but because they themselves did not know what the truth was, and they were afraid that there will be something shameful. Did they try to hide something? Yes, something unknown to them. "
The result of the investigation was a 495-page report unconvincingly imitating the requirements of “Appendix 13”. It was filled with sample descriptions of the Boeing 777 systems, which were clearly copied from the manufacturer’s manuals and did not represent any technical value. In fact, nothing in the report had any technical value, since the Australian publications already fully described satellite information and analysis of ocean currents. The Malaysian report was not so much an investigation as an excuse, and its only significant contribution was a frank description of the errors in air traffic control, probably because half of the mistakes could be blamed on the Vietnamese, and also because the Malaysian dispatchers were the easiest and most vulnerable target . The document was published in July 2018, more than four years after the incident, and stated that the investigation team was unable to establish the cause of the disappearance of the aircraft.
The idea that a complex machine equipped with modern technologies and redundant communications may just disappear seems absurd.
Such a conclusion encourages the continuation of speculation, regardless of whether it is justified or not. Satellite data is the best proof of the flight path, and it’s hard to argue with them, but people will not be able to agree with the explanation if they don’t trust the numbers. The authors of many theories have published speculation, taken up by social networks, which ignored satellite data, and sometimes radar tracks, aircraft design, air traffic control records, flight physics, and school knowledge of geography. For example, a British woman who runs a blog under the name Saucy Sailoress and makes a living by telling Tarot wandered around South Asia on a sailboat with her husband and dogs. According to her, on the night of the disappearance of the MH370 they were in the Andaman Sea, where she saw a cruise missile flying to meet her. The rocket turned into a low-flying aircraft with a brightly lit cabin, filled with a strange orange glow and smoke. When he flew past, she decided that this was an air raid directed against the navy of China, located further into the sea. Then she still did not know about the disappearance of MH370, but when she read about him a few days later, she made obvious conclusions for herself. It would seem implausible, but she found her audience.
One Australian has been claiming for several years that he was able to detect the MH370 using Google Earth in shallow water and intact; he refuses to report the location while working on the expedition's crowdfunding. On the Internet, you will find allegations that the plane was found in the Cambodian jungle intact, that it was seen landing in an Indonesian river, that it flew through time, that it sucked into a black hole. According to one of the scenarios, the plane flies to attack the US military base on Diego Garcia, and then it is shot down. A recent publication that Captain Zachary was found alive and is lying in a Taiwanese hospital with amnesia has gained enough acceptance for Malaysia to refute. The news came from a purely satirical site that also reported on sexual harassment of an American mountaineer in Nepal and two sherpas from a yeti-like creature.
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To be continued.
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