The man solving Malaysia flight 370
Blaine Alan Gibson has been called a modern-day Indiana Jones – though in temperament he’s probably a lot closer to Sherlock Holmes.
Blaine Alan Gibson has been called a modern-day Indiana Jones – though in temperament he’s probably a lot closer to Sherlock Holmes.
Gibson, 59, made headlines around the world earlier this year after he found debris from a Boeing 777 that was later confirmed to be a piece of the infamous Malaysia flight 370 aircraft, which went missing shortly after take-off on 8 March 2014 with 239 people on board.
After diligently working to transfer the panel to the authorities, Gibson stayed on the case, conducting his own unpaid investigation in 12 countries to solve the mystery of flight 370.
Gibson is a man who defies easy description. He is a lawyer who has never practiced law, a businessman who isn’t particularly focused on making money, and a traveller whose goal is to find clarity, not see the sights.
We linked up with Gibson in the Maldives, where he was searching for more flight 370 clues, to find out if a humble traveller can indeed solve some of the world’s great mysteries.
Q: Where did your interest in travel come from?
I was born in San Francisco and grew up in the Bay Area and Carmel. My father was the Chief Justice of California so I grew up with politics, but I always loved travel. I collected National Geographic magazines, and from a young age I was interested in memorizing where all the countries were located and what their capitals were. I decided early on I wanted to go to all of them. I’m going to do it. I have 18 countries left to visit. Mozambique was number 177 and I found part of a Boeing 777 while I was there.
Q: How much of the year do you spend travelling?
Essentially all of it, now. I used to travel half the year but since I sold our family home in Carmel [California] and got interested in Malaysia 370, now I’m travelling non-stop. I want to keep looking for more debris and find answers regarding Malaysia 370. That’s my search, that’s my adventure right now.
Q: How do you finance your travels?
My style of travel is not the expensive kind. I like to go places where I know people or meet people who invite me to stay in their homes. Or I stay in moderately priced hotels, or I camp and backpack. I’m in the Maldives right now and I was staying in a $34 per night hotel, not a $1,000 per night resort. That’s my style. I hang with local people everywhere I go.
Q: Do you think you have to travel to get the real story?
Absolutely. You can go to a place and no matter how much you’ve read about it, you can just feel things in the air. If there is going to be a coup or if things will be resolved peacefully, you can feel it and no amount of reading and research can substitute that.
I went to the Soviet Union in 1976, age 19, just to understand what it was like. I met the Russian people and saw that they were no different from us. I could tell in 1976, when people were trying to buy blue jeans and get rock ‘n’ roll music, that communism wouldn’t last.
Q: Where were you when Malaysia 370 disappeared?
I was selling our family home in Carmel, going through boxes of childhood memories and photographs. As I was doing this, I learned that the plane had flown on for seven hours and had crossed from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean and disappeared. I was captivated. It piqued my fascination with geography, aviation, terrorism, travel – all of it.
When I learned that there were sightings of the plane in the Maldives but they were disregarded because the satellites said the plane went way south, I remember thinking, “Why not listen to the witnesses? There could be survivors in those warm waters near the Maldives.”
That’s why I’m here in the Maldives now, to pursue these angles. I’ve met a number of these fishermen and their testimony was very credible. They told me they saw a low flying, white, red and blue jet plane fly over their island at 6:15am local time, which would have been right before the flight ran out of fuel, if it went that way. That plane has not been identified. If the eyes of the satellite data are wrong for whatever reason, the eyes of the fishermen may be right. It could have been 370; it matched the description.
Q: How long have you been investigating this disappearance?
I started around March 2015, one year after the disappearance. The official search off the coast of Australia, based on satellite interpretation, found absolutely nothing. So I thought I’d talk to the family members at the one-year commemoration and people in the Maldives. The officials were spending $100 million and hadn’t found anything, so I thought maybe I could help solve this. I’ve travelled to Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, the Maldives, Cambodia, Mauritius, Reunion, Australia, the US, Madagascar and Mozambique looking for clues.
Q: How did you find this part of the plane wing?
Madagascar blocks most debris traveling from the east; it’s like a magnet [in June 2016, Gibson found more possible debris from the plane in northeast Madagascar]. But Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi, an aviation expert at the University of Western Australia, told me that if debris misses Madagascar to the north or south, it would likely wash ashore in Mozambique.
So I chartered a boat in February 2016, and asked the locals, as I have in every country I’ve gone to, where does stuff tend to wash ashore? They said there was a sandbank near the town of Vilankulos, where fishermen go to pick up nets and buoys that wash in. I had no expectation to find anything. I had already combed beaches in the Gulf of Thailand, the Bay of Bengal, the Andaman Sea and the Maldives, and had found nothing by this point.
We walked around and it was just beach junk. But suddenly, maybe 15ft away, the owner of the boat holds up a triangular, grey piece and he says, “Is this Malaysia 370?” I walked over, and saw it had the words “No Step” on it. I knew it was from a plane. “No Step” is written on plane tails and wings so that workers don’t step on them, and it’s distinctive to Boeing aircraft.
Q: What did you do with the panel?
That was a challenge and an awesome responsibility. I sent emails and photos to Australia’s Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is leading search operations for MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean.
Air Crash Support Group Australia, a non-profit that helps family members with loved ones involved in aviation accidents, had previously introduced me to key personnel from the ATSB, so they knew me and knew to take me seriously. They said, “Take good care of this and please try not to talk too much about it because it could upset the families. Get it into our hands.”
I took it to Maputo and went with the Australian consul to turn it into the country’s head of civil aviation. It was finally confirmed that the panel was part of the plane about three weeks later.
Q: Did this discovery lead you to any conclusions?
It did. I always thought they wouldn’t find it deep underwater where they were looking. After I found the panel, more people reported debris. A high school student found a piece of the plane on a Mozambique beach in December that was confirmed as authentic as well. An archaeologist was walking on the beach in South Africa and found a piece that looked like what I found. Now five pieces have been found: one in Mauritius, two in Mozambique, one in South Africa and one on Reunion.
Through these findings, I have eliminated some theories of what happened. The plane crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean, south of the equator but north of 40 degrees. It didn’t crash way down south or the debris would have gone to Australia and Tasmania. It didn’t crash in the Gulf of Thailand or the Bay of Bengal.
Q: Do you think the official investigation is on the right track?
I think they’re doing the very best they can, but they are basing it solely on satellite data interpretation. If the satellite communication system wasn’t working perfectly, or if any of their assumptions about speed, altitude and course are wrong, then they’re looking in the wrong place.
Q: How will you know when you’re ready to move on to something else?
Since I found a piece of the plane and have gotten to know many of the family members [whose relatives were on the flight], I’m probably not going to give up on this until I or someone else finds it. I want to solve this mystery.
Q: What do you think is the most likely scenario?
It could have been a mechanical problem or fire; but it’s also possible the plane was hijacked by a third party. The debris is small and shattered and the flap was retracted, which shows it was not a controlled glide. From the very beginning, people were trying to blame the pilot and sweep this under the rug. But there is nothing in his history or psychology to suggest that he would have wanted to end his life and take other people down with him. We must search on for the sake of the families and the flying public. We need more evidence to know for sure.
Q: How do you respond to people who tell you to leave the investigation to the experts?
I have heard this often. People say mine isn’t a real investigation. Well, the experts haven’t found anything and I have. The foreign policy experts didn’t see the breakup of the Soviet Union coming. I knew it was coming because I had been there. Experts are often so shielded that they miss the big picture.
Gibson, 59, made headlines around the world earlier this year after he found debris from a Boeing 777 that was later confirmed to be a piece of the infamous Malaysia flight 370 aircraft, which went missing shortly after take-off on 8 March 2014 with 239 people on board.
After diligently working to transfer the panel to the authorities, Gibson stayed on the case, conducting his own unpaid investigation in 12 countries to solve the mystery of flight 370.
Gibson has been called a modern-day Indiana Jones (Credit: Mark Graham/Getty)
Gibson is a man who defies easy description. He is a lawyer who has never practiced law, a businessman who isn’t particularly focused on making money, and a traveller whose goal is to find clarity, not see the sights.
We linked up with Gibson in the Maldives, where he was searching for more flight 370 clues, to find out if a humble traveller can indeed solve some of the world’s great mysteries.
Q: Where did your interest in travel come from?
I was born in San Francisco and grew up in the Bay Area and Carmel. My father was the Chief Justice of California so I grew up with politics, but I always loved travel. I collected National Geographic magazines, and from a young age I was interested in memorizing where all the countries were located and what their capitals were. I decided early on I wanted to go to all of them. I’m going to do it. I have 18 countries left to visit. Mozambique was number 177 and I found part of a Boeing 777 while I was there.
Q: How much of the year do you spend travelling?
Essentially all of it, now. I used to travel half the year but since I sold our family home in Carmel [California] and got interested in Malaysia 370, now I’m travelling non-stop. I want to keep looking for more debris and find answers regarding Malaysia 370. That’s my search, that’s my adventure right now.
Since he started investigating Malaysia 370, Gibson has been travelling non-stop (Credit: Blaine Alan Gibson)
Q: How do you finance your travels?
My style of travel is not the expensive kind. I like to go places where I know people or meet people who invite me to stay in their homes. Or I stay in moderately priced hotels, or I camp and backpack. I’m in the Maldives right now and I was staying in a $34 per night hotel, not a $1,000 per night resort. That’s my style. I hang with local people everywhere I go.
Q: Do you think you have to travel to get the real story?
Absolutely. You can go to a place and no matter how much you’ve read about it, you can just feel things in the air. If there is going to be a coup or if things will be resolved peacefully, you can feel it and no amount of reading and research can substitute that.
I went to the Soviet Union in 1976, age 19, just to understand what it was like. I met the Russian people and saw that they were no different from us. I could tell in 1976, when people were trying to buy blue jeans and get rock ‘n’ roll music, that communism wouldn’t last.
Q: Where were you when Malaysia 370 disappeared?
I was selling our family home in Carmel, going through boxes of childhood memories and photographs. As I was doing this, I learned that the plane had flown on for seven hours and had crossed from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean and disappeared. I was captivated. It piqued my fascination with geography, aviation, terrorism, travel – all of it.
When I learned that there were sightings of the plane in the Maldives but they were disregarded because the satellites said the plane went way south, I remember thinking, “Why not listen to the witnesses? There could be survivors in those warm waters near the Maldives.”
That’s why I’m here in the Maldives now, to pursue these angles. I’ve met a number of these fishermen and their testimony was very credible. They told me they saw a low flying, white, red and blue jet plane fly over their island at 6:15am local time, which would have been right before the flight ran out of fuel, if it went that way. That plane has not been identified. If the eyes of the satellite data are wrong for whatever reason, the eyes of the fishermen may be right. It could have been 370; it matched the description.
Gibson found more possible debris in Madagascar (Credit: Blaine Alan Gibson)
Q: How long have you been investigating this disappearance?
I started around March 2015, one year after the disappearance. The official search off the coast of Australia, based on satellite interpretation, found absolutely nothing. So I thought I’d talk to the family members at the one-year commemoration and people in the Maldives. The officials were spending $100 million and hadn’t found anything, so I thought maybe I could help solve this. I’ve travelled to Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, the Maldives, Cambodia, Mauritius, Reunion, Australia, the US, Madagascar and Mozambique looking for clues.
Q: How did you find this part of the plane wing?
Madagascar blocks most debris traveling from the east; it’s like a magnet [in June 2016, Gibson found more possible debris from the plane in northeast Madagascar]. But Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi, an aviation expert at the University of Western Australia, told me that if debris misses Madagascar to the north or south, it would likely wash ashore in Mozambique.
So I chartered a boat in February 2016, and asked the locals, as I have in every country I’ve gone to, where does stuff tend to wash ashore? They said there was a sandbank near the town of Vilankulos, where fishermen go to pick up nets and buoys that wash in. I had no expectation to find anything. I had already combed beaches in the Gulf of Thailand, the Bay of Bengal, the Andaman Sea and the Maldives, and had found nothing by this point.
Gibson knew the part was from a plane when he saw the words “No Step” on it (Credit: Adrien Barbier/Getty)
We walked around and it was just beach junk. But suddenly, maybe 15ft away, the owner of the boat holds up a triangular, grey piece and he says, “Is this Malaysia 370?” I walked over, and saw it had the words “No Step” on it. I knew it was from a plane. “No Step” is written on plane tails and wings so that workers don’t step on them, and it’s distinctive to Boeing aircraft.
Q: What did you do with the panel?
That was a challenge and an awesome responsibility. I sent emails and photos to Australia’s Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is leading search operations for MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean.
Air Crash Support Group Australia, a non-profit that helps family members with loved ones involved in aviation accidents, had previously introduced me to key personnel from the ATSB, so they knew me and knew to take me seriously. They said, “Take good care of this and please try not to talk too much about it because it could upset the families. Get it into our hands.”
I took it to Maputo and went with the Australian consul to turn it into the country’s head of civil aviation. It was finally confirmed that the panel was part of the plane about three weeks later.
Q: Did this discovery lead you to any conclusions?
It did. I always thought they wouldn’t find it deep underwater where they were looking. After I found the panel, more people reported debris. A high school student found a piece of the plane on a Mozambique beach in December that was confirmed as authentic as well. An archaeologist was walking on the beach in South Africa and found a piece that looked like what I found. Now five pieces have been found: one in Mauritius, two in Mozambique, one in South Africa and one on Reunion.
Through these findings, I have eliminated some theories of what happened. The plane crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean, south of the equator but north of 40 degrees. It didn’t crash way down south or the debris would have gone to Australia and Tasmania. It didn’t crash in the Gulf of Thailand or the Bay of Bengal.
Several pieces that could be from the aircraft are under evaluation (Credit: Blaine Alan Gibson)
Q: Do you think the official investigation is on the right track?
I think they’re doing the very best they can, but they are basing it solely on satellite data interpretation. If the satellite communication system wasn’t working perfectly, or if any of their assumptions about speed, altitude and course are wrong, then they’re looking in the wrong place.
Q: How will you know when you’re ready to move on to something else?
Since I found a piece of the plane and have gotten to know many of the family members [whose relatives were on the flight], I’m probably not going to give up on this until I or someone else finds it. I want to solve this mystery.
Q: What do you think is the most likely scenario?
It could have been a mechanical problem or fire; but it’s also possible the plane was hijacked by a third party. The debris is small and shattered and the flap was retracted, which shows it was not a controlled glide. From the very beginning, people were trying to blame the pilot and sweep this under the rug. But there is nothing in his history or psychology to suggest that he would have wanted to end his life and take other people down with him. We must search on for the sake of the families and the flying public. We need more evidence to know for sure.
Q: How do you respond to people who tell you to leave the investigation to the experts?
I have heard this often. People say mine isn’t a real investigation. Well, the experts haven’t found anything and I have. The foreign policy experts didn’t see the breakup of the Soviet Union coming. I knew it was coming because I had been there. Experts are often so shielded that they miss the big picture.
Gibson vows not to stop investigating flight 370 until the mystery is solved (Credit: Blaine Alan Gibson)
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