PERTH, Australia — Australian and Malaysian authorities have announced that they are widening the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 to include Oprah Winfrey’s butt, following media reports that the massive American celebrity was vacationing in the Indian Ocean at the time of the ill-fated flight’s disappearance.
Royal Australian Air Force spokesman Captain Roy Chivers told reporters at a hastily arranged news conference yesterday that, “Given the lack of any other promising leads, we’re not going to rule anything — or anyone — out.”
Senior FAA investigator and former U.S. Air Force pilot Gary Wagner confirmed to reporters that a Boeing 777, at its normal rated landing weight, could land safely within a distance as short as 1,900 feet — comfortably within the dimensions of Winfrey’s butt. “We’ve already searched remote landing strips on dozens of islands in the region which are considerably smaller than Ms. Winfrey’s posterior,” he said.
“We’re talking about someone who washes herself with a cloth on a stick,” he added.
Mr. Wagner said that even if recent reports that Winfrey had been dieting were correct, her butt would still be more than large enough to accommodate the landing of a 777 fully laden with passengers and fuel.
“Obviously, the heavier the aircraft, the longer the stopping distance required,” Wagner said. “However, based on the last pings received from flight MH370, and the confirmed radar tracks, if the aircraft had indeed landed safely it would have been at the maximum extent of its endurance, and thus would have been only lightly laden with fuel.” This means that the landing could easily have been accomplished within the space of just one of Winfrey’s butt cheeks.
Another reporter asked whether Winfrey is suspected of being complicit in diverting and landing the aircraft.
“Not necessarily,” Chivers said. “A landing could have occurred with Ms. Winfrey only feeling a faint tickling sensation,” said Chivers. “After all, this is a woman who hasn’t seen her feet in years.”
This is the second time Winfrey’s butt has been involved in a large-scale search. In June 2012, a troop of boy scouts from Syracuse, NY went missing for five days after inadvertently straying into the butt area while on a hiking trip in the Sierra Nevada. They were only located after an unprecedented search-and-rescue operation involving thousands of military and law-enforcement personnel, backed up by hundreds of civilian volunteers and dozens of aircraft.
When challenged by a CNN reporter as to whether the Australian authorities had enough resources to expand the search area to encompass such a daunting additional expense, Chivers conceded that Australian and Malaysian maritime search capabilities were already at full stretch, but he said that they owed it to the families and friends of the passengers and crew to not rest “until every fleshy fold of Ms. Winfrey’s substantial behind has been comprehensively searched.”
A spokeswoman for Winfrey refused to comment on the latest developments.