Was flight MH370 found in the Cambodian jungle? What we know

A British video producer’s claim that he found missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in a dense Cambodian jungle has resurfaced online despite serious doubts being raised about his theory.

British tabloids reprinted Ian Wilson’s 2018 comments over the weekend in which he said he found a plane clearly sitting in the East Asian country’s Pursat province while scanning satellite images on Google Maps. The story recently resurfaced in Daily Mirror, daily star, And Daily logresulting in an uptick in Google searches on the results.

Newsweek I was able to verify the aircraft’s location and presence in images produced by Maxar Technologies of the platform. However, the plane is visible in photographs dating back to January 1, 2004, more than a decade before MH370 disappeared.

“I was there, a few hours here, a few hours there. If you add that up, I spent hours looking for places where the plane could have fallen – and in the end, you see where the plane is,” Wilson said five years ago. “It’s literally the greenest and darkest part you can see.”

Newsweek I contacted the Civil Aviation Authority of Malaysia and the Ministry of Transport via email for comment on Tuesday.

MH370 disappeared from radar screens on March 8, 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, China. There were 12 crew members and 227 passengers on board.

The plane’s last contact with air traffic controllers on the ground was about 38 minutes after takeoff while flying over the South China Sea. It was then tracked on radar for another hour, and appears to have deviated from its westward flight path towards the Indian Ocean.

While there were many theories about where the plane might have gone, the official investigation assumed that the plane ran out of fuel somewhere over the Indian Ocean, based on the errant path suggested by radar tracking.

The Malaysian Ministry of Transport’s final report, published in July 2018, concluded that investigators did not know what happened to the plane. While the report identified errors by air traffic controllers, it did not rule out “unlawful interference.”

Debris consistent with that of a Boeing 777 has been found on beaches overlooking the ocean, but has not been conclusively proven to be from MH370 itself. Some have questioned the accuracy of the radar readings and claimed to have found satellite images of the wreckage elsewhere, as shown in a Netflix documentary released in March.

From tip to tail, the plane in the satellite image is about 242 feet long, while the Boeing 777 model designated MH370 is 209 feet long. Wilson noticed a gap between the end of the fuselage and the dorsal wing, and told the… a star It “likely explains” the discrepancy.

One Reddit user, who recently analyzed the plane’s location in or over the Cambodian jungle, noted that it was consistent with MH370’s original flight path before it deviated from its assumed course, which would have put the plane on a north-northeast trajectory.

However, the plane shown in the satellite image is facing southeast, a discrepancy that is not yet explained. More importantly, its existence predates the disappearance of MH370.

Users on Reddit also pointed out that “there is simply no chance that a plane crashing into a forest would look like that perfect photo of a carefully parked plane or a flying plane.” Others said Google Maps and other web mapping sites often show “airplanes like this may appear to be on the ground but were actually flying when the satellite image was taken,” and that appears to be the case here.

A study published in the journal Provided by the Arabian Gulf University Last month, it was hypothesized that a study of chemicals found in barnacles living on plane wreckage could help locate the missing plane. Barnacles are small crustaceans that grow on the sides of boats, rocks, and even on whales. The study’s authors studied barnacles to determine ocean temperatures in places where the animal was present, just from signals in its shell chemistry.

Updated 6/9/23 at 5:42 a.m. ET: The headline on this story has been updated.

Updated 09/06/23, 8:09 a.m. ET: This article has been updated to include more information about the satellite images.