A MYSTERIOUS PIECE of plane wreckage washed up on Nakhon Si Thammarat province’s Pak Phanang beach with the code CCBU 07ZS visible at a few places, Sanook.com said today (Mar. 15)
The curved metal sheet of a plane that reached the beach is 1.80 metres wide, 3.16 metres long, and weighs about 70-80 kilogrammes. On the inner side it is lined with honeycomb-like material and around the joints the code CCBU 07ZS was engraved in several places.
There were also two black burn-like marks.
Mr. Pramote Ruangdit, Tha Phaya subdistrict chief, said that villagers walking around the beach looking for old objects to sell ran into the large metal debris but they were not sure what it was so contacted him and other neighbours to move it to the city.
They sent photos of the puzzling metal part to aviation experts who said they were 80 percent certain it belonged to an aircraft.
However it was not known what aircraft it came from and a detailed examination will be held to determine this.
Nevertheless Pramote believes it is a part of an aircraft that likely exploded or caught fire before crashing into the sea to go by the traces of fire on it.
The crash also probably happened a long time ago because of mollusks and barnacles on it.
Villagers here had also also found another piece of a plane wreckage washed up on the same beach six years ago, in Jan. 2016
The find fueled speculation in the Thai media that the debris could belong to Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which disappeared with 239 people on board during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014, according to Reuters.
However aviation experts and Thai officials later said it was unlikely that the debris belonged to the missing Malaysian aircraft.
The search for the vanished airplane, which became the most expensive in aviation history, focused initially on the South China Sea and Andaman Sea, before analysis of the aircraft’s automated communications with an Inmarsat satellite indicated a possible crash site somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, according to Wikipedia.
Several pieces of marine debris confirmed to be from the aircraft washed ashore in the western Indian Ocean during 2015 and 2016.
After a three-year search across 120,000 km2 (46,000 sq mi) of ocean failed to locate the aircraft, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre heading the operation suspended its activities in January 2017. A second search launched in January 2018 by private contractor Ocean Infinity also ended without success after six months.
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The part of a plane that washed up on Pak Phanang beach today. Photos: Sanook.com
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