Flight MH370 Update: Debris Hunters Team Up In South Africa To Search For Evidence

A trio of amateur MH370 investigators met up this weekend to scour the South African shoreline for evidence of the missing plane. Blaine Gibson, Neels Kruger and Liam Lotter, who among them have uncovered a dozen suspected pieces of debris from the Boeing 777, started an unofficial search Saturday near Durban, East Coast Radio reported.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished in March 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. Gibson, Kruger and Lotter have accomplished what an expansive sweep of the Indian Ocean has not — they've found pieces of the aircraft.

Gibson, a lawyer from Seattle, found debris this past March in Mozambique that Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said had a "high possibility" of being from MH370. Lotter, a teenager from South Africa, discovered a wing part this past December that Australian Minister for Infrastructure and Transport said was "almost certainly" from the missing flight. Kruger, an archaeologist from South Africa, located an engine part in March that also had links to the plane.

"We need to do something, the three of us — myself, Blaine and Neels — because not much is being done. People are sort of like shrugging it off, if I can say that," Lotter told ECR. "And we want to just try to help."

The group plans to walk along beaches in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal and look for plastic, metal or fiberglass.

"Pieces of the plane would be light grey or white and could look as though they are from a boat, surfboard or even a box," Gibson told the Independent Online. "Debris will not only tell us where the plane crashed, but also why."

Authorities with the formal search for MH370 have scanned about 110,000 square kilometers of a predetermined 120,000-square-kilometer area without results. Unless new evidence turns up, ministers from Australia, Malaysia and China will suspend the hunt once the area has been completely checked over.