Brothers claim missing Malaysian airline debris visible on Google Earth

Two Maltese brothers believe they have located debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 through Google Earth. 

Raymond and Charles Coleiro told MaltaToday that they have been searching online for pieces of the elusive wreckage for months, ever since aircraft debris washed up on Réunion Island in July last year. MH370 went missing two years ago.

Satellite images off the coast of Mozambique seen by MaltaToday are intriguing. 

One of the images, by the coast of the Matatuine district of the east African country, clearly shows a capital letter ‘M’. The Coleiros believe that this could signal the location of the part of the plane where its registration number – 9M-MRO – was written. 

Further south, the brothers spotted what appears to be an ‘s’ next to what they believe to be a ‘y’ – cut off at the tip and bent in the style used by Malaysia Airlines. The Coleiros believe that the symbols next to it could be an ‘a’ and an ‘l’.

The stickers on the plane were a dark shade of blue, in contrast with the white letters seen on Google Earth. However, Charles Coleiro – a former manager at the Medavia aviation company – said that this anomaly could be explained through reflection.  

This is not the first sighting of the Malaysia Airlines plane on Google Earth; earlier this month, a UFO hunter claimed to have stumbled upon the body of the plane while searching for alien life off the coast of South Africa. 

Google has warned users not to rely on its satellite imagery for MH370-hunting, as the images are provided by third parties and are often several weeks or months old. 

Yet the Coleiros’ location is certainly consistent with the recent discovery of debris that the Australian government is “almost certain” originates from the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.  

Blaine Gibson, an American lawyer who had spent much of the last year on a solo quest to find the plane, stumbled upon a metre-long piece of metal on a sandbank in Mozambique on 27 February. Global coverage of his find prompted South African teenager Liam Lotter to come forward with a similar piece of metal that he had found on a beach while on holiday in Mozambique. 

The two pieces of debris were sent to Canberra for examination, where they were found earlier this week to be consistent with panels from a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft. 

Prior to these finds, only a wing part that drifted on a beach on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion had been confirmed as originating from the missing plane. 

“That such debris has been found on the east coast of Africa is consistent with drift modelling performed by CSIRO and further affirms our search efforts in the southern Indian Ocean,” Australian infrastructure minister Darren Chester said. “The search for MH370 continues. There are 25,000 square kilometres of the underwater search area still to be searched. We are focused on completing this task and remain hopeful the aircraft will be found.” 

The MH370 aeroplane vanished on 8 March 2014 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with 239 passengers and crew on board. 

Australia is leading the search for the missing jet in the southern Indian Ocean, where the plane is believed to have crashed after diverting from its route. 

The alleged debris can be viewed on Google Earth and Google Maps by typing in the official coordinates: 26°32’00.3”S 32°54’58.2”E and 26°19’48.4”S 32°55’49.7”E.