MH370 solved? Retired British engineer claims to have ‘pinpointed’ site of doomed plane

The disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines flight, carrying 239 passengers and crew, is one of the world’s biggest aviation mysteries. Somewhere, in the vast expanse of the Earth, lies MH370. It fell off radars on March 8, 2014, and the official search lasted for years.

But in 2017, the authorities closed the books on the case.

This has not stopped people the world over from continuing the hunt.

While many have claimed breakthrough finds in the past, none has come as close as the recent work of retired British engineer, Richard Godfrey.

He has spent seven years researching and studying the case.

Now, he believes he has calculated the exact location of where MH370 crashed.

He believes the Boeing 777 fell into the Indian Ocean 2,000 kilometres (1,242 miles) west of Perth, Western Australia.

Speaking to a range of news outlets over the weekend, he said he hoped that his work would be able to provide “closure” to the families who have for years been unable to find an answer about their lost loved ones.

Combining different data sets that were previously kept in seperate domains, he aligned the new location in the southern Indian Ocean.

Mr Godfrey told the BBC it was a “complicated exercise”, but previously there was simply a lack of lateral thinking, across multiple disciplines, to bring this together.

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But Mr Godfrey says this is not the case.

Rather, he said it is more like looking for something “microscopic in a haystack”, adding: “It’s very difficult to do.”

A number of conspiracy theories have since emerged surrounding MH370 and more than 150 books have been written about it.

Mr Godfrey has come up with one of his own, telling The Sunday Times: “To me, it is clear there is still certain information being withheld, principally by the Malaysian government.”

Far smaller than previous searches, Mr Godfrey’s proposal is a circle radius of 40 nautical miles.

He said: “The wreckage could be behind a cliff or in a canyon on the ocean floor.

“And you need maybe three or four passes before you start to pick things up.”

He added that the wreckage could lie as far as 4,000 metres deep.

More than 30 pieces of aircraft debris have washed up on beaches along Africa’s coast and islands in the Indian Ocean.

In 2009, Mr Godfrey was due to be a passenger on Air France 477 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

Work plans meant that he had to miss the flight and remain in Brazil.

That flight never reached its destination and was lost in the Atlantic.

It was from this point that he became interested in flights lost at sea, and started locating them.