In a bid to unravel the biggest modern aviation mystery, tech expert Ian Wilson will head into the Cambodian jungle in a couple of weeks after he allegedly spotted the ill-fated Malaysia Airlines aircraft on Google Maps.
READ MORE: MH370: Missing Malaysian Airliner Reportedly Spotted in Cambodian Jungle
The company will fly him around three miles away from the coordinates he determined because the jungle is said to be too dense, so, once landed, Wilson, accompanied by an experienced guide, will embark on his mission.
“If someone comes along, I’ll take anyone there. You’d have to walk from around three miles. We can drop him off or land anywhere, but he’s really got to sit down and plan the whole thing. It’s not as simple as dropping off and just heading into the jungle, it’s pretty thick in there. […] The risk is going in and getting lost if you’ve got jungle and tall trees. But you can get people to help you, hunters or working in that area,” the head of Helicopters Cambodia told the Daily Star.
Wilson, who is expected to leave for Cambodia in October, said that the company specialized in “going into really dense terrain.”
“There was a section called ‘special purposes’, so I said if I was to turn up, give you some coordinates, is it possible you could take me there? He said I know who you are, and absolutely you can take me there and gave me the price, which was like $4,000. The helicopter company said if we take you, we’ll get you right in there.”
However, private investigator Andre Milne told the Daily Star that their mission was “useless” due to the fact that they didn’t make the trek by foot.
“Flying ‘over’ a deep jungle growth forest to look for an aircraft that has been on the ground for over four years is virtually useless because of the thick vegetation that will have grown all around and over the aircraft making it impossible to see from the air. I know this from firsthand experience of having investigated aircraft and helicopter crash sites in tropical growth forest regions in the past. Google must confirm the authenticity of the image and the coordinates immediately, provided the image is deemed as authentic,” Milne was cited as saying.
After finding the alleged crash site using satellite images on Google Earth, Wilson discovered that the purported plane was 70 meters as opposed to 63.7 meters that the Malaysia Airlines jet should be. He, however, believes that this may be due to the destruction of the aircraft’s tail section.
READ MORE: Flight MH370: Unplanned Turn Done Manually, Not by Autopilot — Investigators
Shortly after take-off from Kuala Lumpur, the Beijing-bound Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 with 239 passengers and crew on board disappeared from radar screens on March 8, 2014. So far, only a few pieces of debris believed to be parts of the missing aircraft have been found at different locations, including Mozambique, South Africa and the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean.