Regional News
Southern Thai Villagers Find Mystery Passenger Plane Wreckage on Beach
A curved piece of metal measuring about 2 meters by 3 meters (6 ½ feet by 10 feet) with electrical wires hanging from it and numbers stamped on it in several places.
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NAKHON SI THAMMARAT – Tanyapat Patthikongpan, head of Pak Phanang district has reported to Thialand’s Aviation Authorities that a large piece of curved metal washed ashore in Nakhon Si Thammarat Province.
Local villagers found a curved piece of metal measuring about 2 meters by 3 meters (6 ½ feet by 10 feet) with electrical wires hanging from it and numbers stamped on it in several places.
Thailand’s Transportation Ministry said four Malaysian officials and two Thai experts will visit the site Monday.
Thai people look at a large chunk of metal found on a beach in Nakhon Si Thammarat province, Thailand
The find has fueled speculation in the Thai media that the debris could belong to MH370, which disappeared with 239 people on board during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014. A piece of the plane washed up on the French island of Reunion in July 2015 but no further trace has been found.
Experts said that while powerful currents sweeping the Indian Ocean could deposit debris thousands of kilometers away, wreckage was extremely unlikely to have drifted across the equator into the northern hemisphere.
The location of the debris in Thailand “would appear to be inconsistent with the drift models that appeared when MH370’s flaperon was discovered in Reunion last July,” said Greg Waldron, Asia Managing Editor at Flightglobal, an industry publication.
The edges of the piece of metal appear to reveal a ‘honeycomb’ structure, which is widely used in aircraft and rockets due to its light weight
“The markings, engineering, and tooling apparent in this debris strongly suggest that it is aerospace related,” said Waldron. “It will need to be carefully examined, however, to determine it’s exact origin.”
Other possible sources of aerospace debris included the launching of space rockets by India eastwards over the Bay of Bengal, he said.
There has been no official confirmation from Thailand that the wreckage belongs even to a plane, never mind the missing Malayasia jet.
A map showing the fated plane’s flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, the wreckage discovered this week in Nakhon Si Thammarat province, Thailand.
“Personally, I don’t think it’s MH370,” Thai government spokesman Sansern Kaewkamnerd told Reuters.
District head Patthikongpan said the debris “could have been under the sea for no more than a year, judging from barnacles on it.”
A spokesman for the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, the Canberra-based authority which is overseeing the international search for MH370, told Reuters it was “awaiting results of the official examination of the material.”
The Malaysian transport ministry is in contact with Thai authorities to verify the debris, a ministry spokesman said.
Investigators believe someone may have deliberately switched off MH370’s transponder before diverting it thousands of miles off course. Most of the passengers were Chinese.
Lingering uncertainty surrounding its fate has tormented the families of those on board. Some have said even the discovery of debris would still not solve the mystery.
The fragment found in Thailand “just doesn’t look like aircraft fuselage,” aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas told Reuters from near Perth.
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any connection with MH370 whatsoever.”
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