The plane, which was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew went missing in mysterious circumstances, went missing in March 2014 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. Its whereabouts has never been found, leading to a vast range of theories, including terrorism, and fanciful claims it had crash-landed in jungles of Cambodia or Malaysia.However, Daniel Holland, special projects director with Daedalus Maritime, is convinced the craft crashed into a small section of the Indian Ocean.
However, Daniel Holland, special projects director with Daedalus Maritime, is convinced the craft crashed into a small section of the Indian Ocean.
And now he putting together an operation to prove his theory using £3.5 million of his own cash from his grandfather’s estate, plus a crowdsourcing initiative to raise the remaining £1.5 million they will need.
Mr Holland, 33, who lives in Farnham in Hampshire, and who has been following the MH370 ever since it disappeared four years ago, admits the mystery has become something of a “passion” for him.
He told Express.co.uk he had decided to take drastic action after reading recent stories suggesting the plane was somewhere in the jungles of south east Asia – claims he regards as entirely unfounded, and based on fundamental misinterpretation of images spotted on Google Earth.
By contrast, Mr Holland and colleagues have undertaken meticulously calculations based and where debris thought to be from the plane has been found in the Indian Ocean.
He told Express.co.uk: “From that we’ve used trigonometry, essentially, to work out where that debris has emanated from.”
The result is that he has narrowed the search area down to 100 square miles.
Large as this sounds, it is vastly smaller than the region which was the subject of an extensive search by an Australian team earlier this year.
The father of three said: “I want to get this project up and running in six weeks.
“I want the families involved to have closure.
“There’s been too much speculation, too many wild theories.
“It’s gone on too long now and if I manage to find it for them I will be the happiest man on Earth.”
The complex operation involves Daniel, friends and colleagues and other interested parties, all of whom have put money into the project.
It will require the team, consisting of former Royal Navy and Merchant Navy officers, to hire a salvage vessel to undertake the search.
However, he is also seeking permission from the United Kingdom Flight Safety Committee (UKFC) and the Malaysian authorities to go ahead.
He added: “I want to do this properly and for everything to be above board.”
Mr Holland’s justgiving page states: “The problem is the failed attempts at locating the wreckage of MH370 and giving the victims a recognised grave site, but also giving the families the closure they so rightly deserve.
“The reason I have a passion for this cause, is that the families are in a state of limbo and have a very real and true right to know where they are so the grieving process can finally occur. The other aspect i want to do this is stopping the fake news stories and false hope articles.
“Having an operational and engineering seafaring background and the ability to analyse data from all angles and not from a slanted view, I feel and hope might just bring this to a close.”
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