After accidentally unearthing a sunken ship back in January, the Australian team in charge of the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 has a much more promising lead. Two pieces of debris washed up on the shore of Mozambique earlier this month, and after analyzing them the Australian government has confirmed they’re “almost certainly” from MH370. According to the government’s statement, the location of the debris is consistent with drift modeling and “further confirms” the plane went down somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean.
Blaine Alan Gibson, an American obsessed with the case of the missing plane, discovered at least one of the pieces of debris in late February and turned it over to authorities earlier this month. The plane itself vanished two years ago — on March 8, 2014 — taking 239 passengers with it. An Australian search team has been combing the Indian Ocean for signs of the missing plane ever since.
“We think we’ve found the haystack,” Martin Dolan, chief commissioner for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, told BBC last year, referring to the ocean. “We just need to find the needle. We can’t give a 100 percent guarantee but we’re certainly giving it our best shot.” As of now, the team still has 25,000 square kilometers of ocean left to search.
