A British video producer's claim of having found the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in the dense Cambodian jungle has resurfaced online.
British tabloids republished over the weekend Ian Wilson's 2018 comments that he found a plane conspicuously sitting in the Pursat Province of the East Asian nation while scanning through satellite imagery on Google Maps. The story recently reappeared in the Daily Mirror, Daily Star, and Daily Record, sparking an uptick in Google searches around the findings.
Newsweek was able to verify the location and presence of the plane in images produced by Maxar Technologies for the platform dating from this year.
"I was on there, a few hours here, a few hours there. If you added it up, I spent hours searching for places a plane could have gone down—and in the end, as you can see the place where the plane is," Wilson said five years ago. "It is literally the greenest, darkest part you can see."
Newsweek approached the Malaysian Civil Aviation Authority and Ministry of Transport via email for comment on Tuesday.
MH370 disappeared from radar on March 8, 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, China. Onboard were 12 crew members and 227 passengers.
The plane's last communication with air traffic controllers on the ground was around 38 minutes after take-off while over the South China Sea. It was subsequently tracked on radar for another hour, seemingly deviating from its flight path westward towards the Indian Ocean.
While there have been many theories as to where the plane might have gone, the official investigation has presumed that the flight ran out of fuel somewhere over the Indian Ocean, based on the wayward trajectory suggested by radar tracking.
The final report by the Malaysian Ministry of Transport, published in July 2018, concluded that investigators did not know what happened to the plane. While it identified mistakes by air traffic controllers, the report did not rule out "unlawful interference."
Debris consistent with a Boeing 777 has washed up on beaches bordering the ocean, but none have been conclusively proven to be from MH370 itself. Some have questioned the accuracy of the radar readings and claim to have found satellite imagery of debris elsewhere, as shown in a Netflix documentary released in March.
From tip to tail, the plane in the Cambodian jungle measures around 242 feet, while the particular model of Boeing 777 that MH370 was is 209 feet. Wilson noted a gap between the end of the fuselage and the dorsal wing, telling the Star that it "would probably account for" the discrepancy.
One Reddit user who recently analyzed the location of a plane in the Cambodian forest noted that it was consistent with the original flight path of MH370 before it supposedly deviated, which would put the plane on a north-north-east trajectory.
However, the plane that appears in the satellite imagery is facing in a south-easterly direction, an as-yet unexplained discrepancy. 3D mapping of the area suggests it is sitting at the base of an incline in a valley, and so it is feasible that, if MH370 was still being manned by a pilot, it could have turned in an attempt to make a softer landing.
Users on Reddit pointed out, however, that there "is simply no chance that a plane crashing into a forest would look anything like that exemplary image of either a carefully parked or flying plane." Others said that Google Maps and other web mapping sites often show "planes like this which might seem to be on the ground but actually were flying when the satellite photo was taken."
A study, published in the journal AGU Advances last month, posits that studying the chemicals present in barnacles that live on aircraft debris could help locate the missing plane. Barnacles are tiny crustaceans that grow on the sides of boats, rocks, and even on whales. The study authors studied barnacles to determine the ocean temperatures in places that the animal has been, just from the signals in the chemistry of its shell.
