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A large piece of aircraft debris found on the island of Pemba off Tanzania in June was from the missing Malaysia Airlines jet MH370, it has been confirmed. The debris, an outboard flap, will be examined further to see if it can provide any clues about the Boeing 777's disappearance. It went missing in March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew on board soon after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, bound for Beijing.

Malaysia said on Friday pieces of debris found in Seychelles are not from missing flight MH370, which vanished in March 2014 on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. The location of the plane has become one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries. It is believed to have gone down in the Indian Ocean. Various pieces of debris have been collected from Indian Ocean islands and Africa's east coast and at least three of them have been confirmed as coming from the missing Boeing 777. Seychelles reported on Thursday the discovery of two pieces of...

Australia's main scientific agency said yesterday it believed with "unprecedented precision and certainty" that a missing Malaysia Airlines aircraft crashed into the sea north-east of an area scoured in a fruitless, nearly three-year underwater search. Its assertion is based on satellite pictures taken two weeks after MH370 went missing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board a flight to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. But the Australian government rejected the conclusion of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), saying it was not specific enough. The Boeing 777 is thought to have been diverted thousands of kilometres off...

STARTLING new evidence has virtually pinpointed the location of MH370 — 1258 days since it disappeared. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has today released an explosive new report that effectively narrows the search zone for the missing plane down to an area half the size of Melbourne. GeoScience Australia has been examining four satellite images taken in the weeks after the plane went missing in the area identified late last year as MH370’s likely resting spot. They found 12 objects in those images that they deemed man-made and 28 that they regard as possibly man-made. The images were taken by...

The report added that “debris drift modeling results present strong evidence that the aircraft is most likely to be located to the north of the current indicative underwater search area”. It identified an area of approximately 25,000 sq. km “with the highest probability of containing the wreckage of the aircraft. The report went on: “The experts concluded that, if this area were to be searched, prospective areas for locating the aircraft wreckage, based on all the analysis to date, would be exhausted.” The governments of Australia, Malaysia and China, where most of the passengers were from, have previously agreed to...

A team led by Eric Jansen, from the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change in Italy, is the latest to try its hand at using modelling to identify the impact site. The approach relies on two years of high-resolution data that describe the currents and wind conditions across the Indian and Southern oceans. Multiple simulations were used to predict where objects might drift given different starting points. These forecasts were then analysed and the greatest weight given to those tracks that best matched the locations of known MH370 debris items. These are the parts of the Boeing 777, such as an...

Top searchers at the Dutch company leading the underwater hunt for Malaysia Airlines jet MH370 say they believe the plane may have glided down rather than dived in the final moments, meaning they have been scouring the wrong patch of ocean for two years. Flight MH370 disappeared in March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew onboard en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. Searchers led by engineering group Fugro (FUGRc.AS) have been combing an area roughly the size of Greece for two years. That search, over 120,000 square kilometers of the southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia, is expected to...

Jeff Wise, a private pilot and freelance writer, who has written a book on MH370, was among those to suggest the parts were planted. "There is only one reasonable conclusion to draw from the condition of these pieces. Since natural means could not have delivered them to the locations where they were discovered, they must have been put there deliberately. They were planted," he wrote last month. Photo: Dr Schalk Lückhoff

ULAANBAATAR (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday the United States would consider any Chinese establishment of an air defense zone over the South China Sea to be a "provocative and destabilizing act". U.S. officials have expressed concern that an international court ruling expected in coming weeks on a case brought by the Philippines against China over its South China Sea claims could prompt Beijing to declare an air defense identification zone, or ADIZ, as it did over the East China Sea in 2013. "We would consider an ADIZ...over portions of the South China Sea as...

...Blaine Gibson, who has been gathering suspected MH370 debris as it washes up on Madagascar and Mozambique, said Mr Raza had been due to deliver new items to Malaysian investigators in Kuala Lumpur when he was unexpectedly slain. The timing has rattled Mr Gibson, who says he has been receiving death threats because of his self-financed mission to solve the baffling aviation mystery. He had planned to keep details of his latest finds — which included two items he considered particularly promising — under wraps until they had been safely transported off the island but changed his mind after Mr...

“Despite every effort using the best science available, cutting-edge technology, as well as modelling and advice from highly skilled professionals who are the best in their field, unfortunately, the search has not been able to locate the aircraft,” the Joint Agency Coordination Center in Australia said in a statement. “The decision to suspend the underwater search has not been taken lightly nor without sadness,” the agency said. The jet carrying 239 people on board vanished from civilian radar in the early hours of March 8, 2014, without so much as a distress call from its pilots. After several false starts,...

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...

BANGKOK (AP) - A large chunk of metal that could be from an aircraft washed ashore in southern Thailand, but Malaysian authorities on Sunday cautioned against speculation of a link to a Malaysia Airlines flight missing almost two years.