Plane hunter won’t give up until mystery solved
Sleuth looking for debris left by Malaysian jet that disappeared in 2014
CANBERRA, Australia — The fedora, the bomber jacket and the consuming quest invite comparisons to Indiana Jones. Blaine Gibson, though, hasn’t matched the film hero’s triumph in finding the legendary chest containing the stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments.
Not that he didn’t try. “The Ark of the Covenant, I did not find it. However, I do believe that it’s in Ethiopia somewhere,” Gibson said recently.
The amateur sleuth has had far greater success finding clues from a modern mystery: the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
He is the first person searching for the plane who has found any trace of it and says he won’t quit gathering clues until the mystery is solved.
“Travel is what I do, but I always love travel with a purpose, and solving the mystery of Malaysia 370 is a purpose … until I or someone else finds out what happened to the plane and those on board,” he said while in the Australian capital of Canberra to visit the headquarters for the official plane search.
The Boeing 777 carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members is thought to have plunged into the southern Indian Ocean after inexplicably flying far off course during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, on March 8, 2014.
The first reports that Gibson had found a possible part of the plane met with skepticism. Other pieces of suspected debris have been stumbled upon by chance. But how could one private citizen succeed in finding a piece of the plane where a multi-government, multimillion-dollar search had failed? Answer: There is no official search being conducted, beyond that of the 46,000 square miles of seabed southwest of Australia calculated to be the crash site.
But the triangular panel stenciled “no step” that Gibson found on Feb. 27 has been confirmed as almost certainly a horizontal stabilizer from a Flight 370 wing.
Gibson said he found himself in Mozambique partly because oceanographers had told him that debris might wash up on its beaches and partly because he had never visited the country.
Getting to know relatives of the missing has ended any chance of his conceding defeat in his search.
“It was good management, but it was also a lot of luck,” Gibson said. “What you don’t see before that were the number of beaches that I combed in Reunion, in Mauritius in other parts of the world and found nothing.”
Gibson has since recovered another 13 pieces of potential debris in Madagascar, with the help of locals he has befriended who now search for him. He and victims’ relatives have been frustrated by Malaysia’s hesitance to collect the debris and potential personal effects and analyze them for clues.
Gibson said he has always worked to fund travel and selling his deceased parents’ home in Carmel, Calif., for more than $1 million in 2014 will keep him in the hunt for Flight 370.