How a humble beach cleaner searching for a stone to crush chillies may have solved the mystery of MH370 by Googling 'plane disasters' after stumbling across 'a weird thing on the shore' 

The discovery of debris wing flap has now focused attention on where in the Indian Ocean the plane - 'most likely' MH370 - might have crashed.

One possibility, which is gaining credibility, is that it came down after passing over the popular British holiday destination of the Maldives, lying off the southern tip of India.

Islanders on a remote Maldives atoll have been insisting for months that they saw a large jet with the red stripe of Malaysia Airlines jets, flying low overhead on the morning MH370 lost contact - a phenomenon they had not witnessed before.

But their reports were dismissed by their own government as attention turned to a search area some 2,000 miles south west of Australia.

The recovery of a wing flap bearing a maintenance code number that matches Boeing 777 aircraft has led to increasing excitement that the first clue has been found indicating that the missing jet had crashed into the Indian Ocean and not in the Gulf of Thailand or the Bay of Bengal.

The two-metre-long section of wreckage was discovered on the island of La Reunion, east of Madagascar, more than 3,800 miles away from where the aircraft was last seen, north of Kuala Lumpur and some 3,000 miles from the search area west of Australia 

Maldive islanders have claimed that they of saw a low-flying aircraft head away from them in a south-westerly direction - towards Mauritius and La Reunion.

Ocean currents swirling in a clockwise direction, experts agreed, could have carried any debris from an aircraft crashing in the Maldives to the coast of La Reunion, where the wing part was found.

The discovery of the part has given researchers the first real lead - given that the wing part is from MH370 and based on the way the currents run - about a possible crash area.

Based on reports by the Maldive islanders, the currents and the state of the wing part - which was covered in barnacles indicating it had been in the water for probably more than a year - there are strong suggestions that the debris reached La Reunion from the north east.

That covers a vast area of ocean, but that south-west line can be narrowed down when fuel reserves of MH370 are calculated.

What then, did the Maldive islanders see early on that morning of March 8, last year, when contact with MH370 was lost?

A number of residents on the remote atoll of Kuda Huvadhoo have told a local news organisation that it was around 6.15am that they saw a jet larger than any aircraft they had seen before flying very low above them.

One compelling account came from 47-year-old court official Abdu Rasheed Ibrahim, who said he watched a very large plane bank slightly before hearing a 'loud noise'.

The reference to the aircraft banking fits in with a theory that the flaps - which control banking - were down because it is a torn-away wing flap that has been found on La Reunion.

A number of witnesses to the low-flying aircraft have filed police reports, among them Ahmed Shiyaam, a 34-year-old IT manager, who said he was 'very sure of what I saw on a very clear and bright day. And what I saw was not normal. The plane was very big and low.' 

There have been suggestions that the Maldives government, which had dismissed the eyewitness accounts, did so because it was embarrassed that its security services did not have a radar system efficient enough to identify a 'foreign' aircraft entering its air space. 

This chart created by oceanographers one year ago predicted debris from missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 could end up on the island of La Reunion.

Aviation experts say it is entirely possible a piece of airplane debris found on La Reunion, located off the coast of Madagascar and about 5,600km (3,500 miles) from the MH370 search site, belongs to the doomed plane.

Oceanographers from the University of Western Australia (UWA) say the location of the newly-discovered aircraft debris is 'entirely consistent' with a graphic they created 12 months ago showing the potential drift patterns of the missing plane. 

Oceanographers created this chart one year ago showing the potential drift of MH370, starting from the Indian Ocean search zone. Experts say the chart's predicitions are 'entirely consistent' with the location of newly-found debris on La Reunion, off the coast of Madagascar

Authorities centred their search in the southern Indian Ocean based on satellite pings from the plane, which went missing in March 2014 with 239 passengers on board.

UWA oceanographer Charitha Pattiaratchi was part of the team that examined surface currants in the region around the search zone to track the dispersal pattern of any possible debris.

'It makes sense based on some of the modelling we did 12 months ago, that some time within 18 to 24 months after [the crash] this could be the area the debris would have ended up in,' said Prof Pattiaratchi. 

DID THE PILOT HIJACK HIS OWN PLANE? 

Pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah planned mass murder because of personal problems, locking his co-pilot out of the cockpit, closing down all communications, depressurising the main cabin and then disabling the aircraft so that it continued flying on auto-pilot until it ran out of fuel.

That was the popular theory in the weeks after the plane's disappearance. 

His personal problems, rumours in Kuala Lumpur said, included a split with his wife Fizah Khan, and his fury that a relative, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, had been given a five-year jail sentence for sodomy shortly before he boarded the plane for the flight to Beijing.

But the pilot's wife angrily denied any personal problems and other family members and his friends said he was a devoted family man and loved his job.

This theory is also the conclusion of the first independent study into the disaster by the New Zealand-based air accident investigator, Ewan Wilson.

Wilson, the founder of Kiwi Airlines and a commercial pilot himself, arrived at the shocking conclusion after considering 'every conceivable alternative scenario'.

However, he has not been able to provide any conclusive evidence to support his theory.

The claims are made in the book 'Goodnight Malaysian 370', which Wilson co-wrote with the New Zealand broadsheet journalist, Geoff Taylor.

It's also been rumoured that Zaharie used a flight simulator at his home to plot a path to a remote island.

However, officials in Kuala Lumpur declared that Malysian police and the FBI's technical experts had found nothing to suggest he was planning to hijack the flight after closely examining his flight simulator. 

IF NOT THE PILOT, WAS THE CO-PILOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MYSTERY?

Co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, again for personal problems, was suspected by rumour-spreaders to have overpowered the pilot and disabled the aircraft, flying it to its doom with crew and passengers unable to get through the locked cockpit door.

Theorists have put forward the suggestion that he was having relationship problems and this was his dramatic way of committing suicide.

But he was engaged to be married to Captain Nadira Ramli, 26, a fellow pilot from another airline, and loved his job. There are no known reasons for him to have taken any fatal action.

Others have suggested that because he was known to have occasionally invited young women into the cockpit during a flight, he had done so this time and something had gone wrong.

Young Jonti Roos said in March that she spent an entire flight in 2011 in the cockpit being entertained by Hamid, who was smoking.

Interest in the co-pilot was renewed when it was revealed he was the last person to communicate from the cockpit after the communication system was cut off. 

DID THE RUSSIANS STEAL MH370 AND FLY THE JET TO KAZAKHSTAN

An expert has claimed the missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 was hijacked on the orders of Vladimir Putin and secretly landed in Kazakhstan.

Jeff Wise, a U.S. science writer who spearheaded CNN's coverage of the Boeing 777-200E, has based his outlandish theory on pings that the plane gave off for seven hours after it went missing, that were recorded by British telecommunications company Inmarsat.

Wise believes that hijackers 'spoofed' the plane's navigation data to make it seem like it went in another direction, but flew it to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, which is leased from Kazakhstan by Russia.

However, Wise admits in New York Magazine that he does not know why Vladimir Putin would want to steal a plane full of people and that his idea is somewhat 'crazy'.

Wise also noted there were three Russian men onboard the flight, two of them Ukrainian passport holders.

Aviation disaster experts analysed satellite data and discovered - like the data recorded by Inmarsat - that the plane flew on for hours after losing contact.

Careful examination of the evidence has revealed that MH370 made three turns after the last radio call, first a turn to the left, then two more, taking the plane west, then south towards Antarctica.

MH370 WAS USED BY TERRORISTS FOR A SUICIDE ATTACK ON THE CHINESE NAVY

This extraordinary claim came from 41-year-old British yachtsman Katherine Tee, from Liverpool, whose initial account of seeing what she thought was a burning plane in the night sky made headlines around the world.

On arrival in Thailand's Phuket after sailing across the Indian Ocean from Cochin, southern India with her husband, she said: 'I could see the outline of the plane - it looked longer than planes usually do.There was what appeared to be black smoke streaming from behind.'

Ms Tee's general description of the time and place was vague and she lost all credibility when she later stated on her blog that she believed MH370 was a kamikaze plane that was aimed at a flotilla of Chinese ships and it was shot down before it could smash into the vessels.

Without solid proof of the satellite data, she wrote on her blog, Saucy Sailoress, the plane she saw was flying at low altitude towards the military convoy she and her husband had seen on recent nights. She added that internet research showed a Chinese flotilla was in the area at the time.

THE JET LANDED ON THE WATER AND WAS SEEN FLOATING ON THE ANDAMAN SEA  

On a flight from Jeddah to Kuala Lumpur that crossed over the Andaman Sea on March 8, Malaysian woman Raja Dalelah, 53, saw what she believed was a plane sitting on the water's surface.

She didn't know about the search that had been started for MH370. She alerted a stewardess who told her to go back to sleep.

'I was shocked to see what looked like the tail and wing of an aircraft on the water,' she said.

It was only when she told her friends on landing in Kuala Lumpur what she had seen that she learned of the missing jet. She had seen the object at about 2.30pm Malaysian time.

She said she had been able to identify several ships and islands before noticing the silver object that she said was a plane.

But her story was laughed off by pilots who said it would have been impossible to have seen part of an aircraft in the water from 35,000ft or seven miles.

Ms Raja filed an official report with police the same day and has kept to her story.

'I know what I saw,' she said.

THE AIRCRAFT SUFFERED A CATASTROPHIC SYSTEMS FAILURE AND CRASH-LANDED ON THE OCEAN

A catastrophic event such as a fire disabling much of the equipment resulted in the pilots turning the plane back towards the Malaysian peninsula in the hope of landing at the nearest airport.

Satellite data, believable or not, suggests the aircraft did make a turn and theorists say there would be no reason for the pilots to change course unless confronted with an emergency.

A fire in a similar Boeing 777 jet parked at Cairo airport in 2011 was found to have been caused by a problem with the first officer's oxygen mask supply tubing.

Stewarts Law, which has litigated in a series of recent air disasters, believes the plane crashed after a fire - similar to the blaze on the Cairo airport runway - broke out in the cockpit.

After an investigation into the Cairo blaze, Egypt's Aircraft Accident Investigation Central Directorate (EAAICD) released their final report which revealed that the fire originated near the first officer's oxygen mask supply tubing.

The cause of the fire could not be conclusively determined, but investigators pinpointed a problem with the cockpit hose used to provide oxygen for the crew in the event of decompression.

Following the 2011 fire, US aircraft owners were instructed to replace the system - it was estimated to cost $2,596 (£1,573) per aircraft. It was not known whether Malaysia Airlines had carried out the change.

If either pilot wanted to crash the plane, why turn it around? So the turn-around suggests they were trying to land as soon as possible because of an emergency.

THE US SHOT DOWN THE AIRCRAFT FEARING A TERROR ATTACK ON DIEGO GARCIA  

The Boeing 777 was shot down by the Americans who feared the aircraft had been hijacked and was about to be used to attack the U.S. military base on Diego Garcia atoll in the Indian Ocean. So conspiracy theorists claim.

And former French airline director Marc Dugain said he had been warned by British intelligence that he was taking risks by investigating this angle.

There is no way of checking whether Dugain received such a warning or why he believes the Americans shot down the plane.

But adding to the theory that the aircraft was flown to Diego Garcia, either by the pilot Zaharie or a hijacker, was the claim that on the pilot's home flight simulator was a 'practice' flight to the island.

Professor Glees said: 'The Americans would have no interest in doing anything of the kind and not telling the world.

'In theory, they might wish to shoot down a plane they thought was attacking them but they wouldn't just fire missiles, they'd investigate it first with fighters and would quickly realise that even if it had to be shot down, the world would need to know.'

Mr Rosenschein said: 'The U.S. would not have been able to hide this fact and in any event, if it were true, they would have admitted their action as it would have prevented a successful terrorist action on this occasion and acted as a deterrent for future terrorist attacks.'