A one-man quest for answers in Malaysian jet’s disappearance

The search for the Malaysia Airlines jet that vanished almost two years ago has involved ships scanning thousands of square miles of the Indian Ocean seabed. But what could be the most promising development in months was the result of a lone man’s search, one that took him to an uninhabited sandbank along the coast of Mozambique. Blaine Alan Gibson’s discovery of a triangular piece of fiberglass composite and aluminum, if it is confirmed to be from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, could add to the scant concrete evidence of what happened to the Boeing 777. Like much of the world, Gibson, a lawyer from Seattle, said he had become intrigued by the fate of the plane while watching the intensive news coverage after its disappearance. He attended events in Kuala Lumpur marking the first anniversary of the flight, and after meeting with families of missing passengers, he decided to pursue his own investigation. “I had some spare time and spare money, so I decided to travel to a few places to get an idea of what may have happened,” he said. The quest has taken him to Myanmar, to look for debris in the Andaman Sea and examine local radar capabilities. He went to the Maldives to speak with people who claimed to have seen a low-flying plane on the day of the flight. He visited the French island of Réunion, east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, where the only confirmed debris from the plane to date, a part of an airplane wing called a flaperon, was found in July. On the morning of Feb. 27, he sailed with Suleman Valy, who is known as Junior and runs a local beach hotel and guide service, and a boat captain to a sandbar called Paluma. “We landed on an island with, like, no vegetation and walked around, up and down,” Mr. Gibson said. “Most of the stuff there was just regular beach junk that I always see — plastic bottles, sandals, cigarette lighters. Suddenly Junior calls out.” The piece they discovered, about a metre long, is fiberglass composite with honeycombed aluminum inside. Investigators said that it could be from the horizontal stabilizer on the tail of the plane. Officials in Australia, which has been coordinating the Indian Ocean search, said it would be sent there for testing. Like the officials, Gibson expressed caution about concluding that the object he found is from Flight 370. The sooner “it gets to Australia and they determine it’s one thing or another, the better,” he said.<br/>