MH370 breakthrough as fisherman claims to have pulled up wing of plane

A new lead on the whereabouts of the missing flight MH370 could have come from a fisherman who claims he found the wing of the plane years ago.

Last year, fisherman Kit Olver told the Sydney Morning Herald that, in 2014, he was working off the south coast of Australia when his net struggled to pull something out of the water.

The now 77-year-old said he fished 'a bloody great wing of a big jet airliner' out of the sea and is certain it wasn't from a smaller vessel - explaining that he had a pilot's licence for small aircraft in his younger days.

The Herald then contacted George Currie, another man who was on the fishing boat that day in 2014, who immediately recognised what he was being asked about.

"You’ve got no idea what trouble we had when we dragged up that wing," he told the paper.

"It was incredibly heavy and awkward. It stretched out the net and ripped it. It was too big to get up on the deck.

ADRIEN BARBIER/AFP via Getty Images

"As soon as I saw it I knew what it was. It was obviously a wing, or a big part of it, from a commercial plane.

"It was white, and obviously not from a military jet or a little plane. It took us all day to get rid of it."

Unable to get the plane wing out of their nets and without the space to bring it on board, Currie said Olver gave the order to cut the net free.

He then said they all wondered if the wing had come from flight MH370, which had gone missing months earlier with 239 people on board.

Olver claimed he'd tried to alert the authorities as to his find but alleged that he either received no reply or was told he'd found a piece of a sunken shipping container.

Adli Ghazali/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Now, the Herald reports that an expert who worked on the initial search for MH370 thinks the fisherman's claim is worth a new investigation.

Underwater surveyor Peter Waring said if they could get accurate coordinates from Olver then a search could be carried out within days, and said that a plane wing could have drifted differently to other pieces of debris.

Authorities think the flight ended up going down in the Indian Ocean, and since it went missing in 2014, several pieces of debris have been found - with multiple finds on the eastern coast of the African continent.

Despite the finds, it's also possible that the plane itself will never be found, but the more debris that is recovered the more information we have to help zero in on a possible location.