Australian sea captain says he may have found missing Malaysian Airlines flight | Hacker News Reader

Australian sea captain says he may have found missing Malaysian Airlines flight

smh.com.au

20 pointsfemto10 comments

I can see why he was dismissed, the location is extremely unlikely. It's to the south of the middle of Australia, which would require going over quite some distance around it in order not to get detected, and would be in the opposite direction of the plotted probable course.

Hum, wings are light for its size and have a big sustaining surface.

Following the sea currents backwards could deserve a try

In the beginning of the article it sounds like he saw the object they caught in the net (“What Olver’s net eventually brought to the surface”, “As soon as I saw it I knew what it was.”). In the end of the article where they cite an email he wrote in 2017, it sounds like he never saw the object but his gut instinct told him it was a wing, not a shipping container (“I am convinced this was an aircraft wing”). The wording of his email doesn’t help his case. Leave out all the irrelevant fluff and just say you caught a commercial plane’s wing or large part of it in your fishing net in 2014 and state the coordinates where you dropped the net.

Regarding the authorities’ response: It’s strange they did not start an investigation when he claimed he found plane debris.

Yeah they found the wing of a plane, raised it with huge effort, took no photos, dropped it back down to the bottom and said nothing for years despite the entire world looking for the missing plane.

A few gaps in this tale.

Well, he claims that he did say something:

> He says he tried to alert authorities of his find soon after returning to port, phoning the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

> Within hours, he received a return call from an official. The message was that a shipping container had fallen from a Russian ship in the area off Robe. The implication, he says, was that he’d probably fished up a shipping container, or part of it.

> AMSA said this week it had no record of corresponding with Olver during that period.

> Unimpressed, he chose not to pursue the matter. Three years later, he tried again.

> Olver wrote an email dated Monday, November 27, 2017, to Ocean Infinity, the company undertaking a new – and ultimately fruitless – search for MH370.

> [...]

> He says he received no reply.

I can’t vouch for the veracity of his account, of course.

What I can do is understand how he would not have had motivation to try reporting it more times after being dismissed, and also how his reports might have got lost among what I imagine were great amounts of unreliable hints coming from all kinds of people.

They informed people immediately, and then several years later.

Kit Olver. Now there's a name from the past.

He was working in a butcher's shop in Portland, in the Australian State of Victoria, when I knew him in the late 1960s. He was a bit of a rogue then. I'm not exactly sure I would believe this tale of his now. The location he gives is thousands of miles away from where the plane is believed to have gone down. And to get there the plane would have had to travel through areas of Australia that have constant radar. It's extremely unlikely.

To be honest, why does it have to be that flight? Couldn’t it be any other unreported or less known wreckage? I don’t know, maybe some cargo plane that was just too costly to operate? I would have expected the journo to at least try and go through a list of all the reported accidents in the area

Modal verb headlines are best ignored.

This article is bullshit. SMH indeed.

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