Thailand flotsam ‘not from MH370’

A piece of suspected plane wreckage found off the east coast of southern Thailand is unlikely to belong to MH370.

Crew on a RAAF Orion search for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight in 2014.

A piece of suspected plane wreckage found off the east coast of southern Thailand is unlikely to belong to Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which vanished nearly two years ago.

A large piece of curved metal washed ashore in Nakhon Si Thammarat province, Tanyapat Patthikongpan, the head of Pak Phanang district, said. Villagers reported it to authorities for identification, he said.

“Villagers found the wreckage, measuring about 2m wide and 3m long,” he said.

The find fuelled 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 last year but no further trace has been found.

Experts said while powerful currents sweeping the Indian Ocean could deposit debris thousands of kilometres 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, the Asia managing editor at Flightglobal, an industry publication.

“The markings, engineering, and tooling apparent in this debris strongly suggest it is aerospace-related,” Mr Waldron said. “It will need to be carefully examined, however, to determine its 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 even belongs to a plane, never mind the missing Malaysia jet.

A spokesman for the Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre, the Canberra-based authority that is overseeing the inter­national search for MH370, said 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. Lingering uncertainty surrounding the fate of MH370 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 said from near Perth. “It just doesn’t make any sense. I don’t think there’s any connection with MH370 whatsoever.”

Aerospace reporter for the Wall Street Journal Jon Ostrower tweeted that the sheet was ­inconsistent with the MH370 aircraft.

“That’s not a piece of any part of a 777. The cargo door latches don’t look like that,” he said.

With AAP, Reuters