Could it be MH370? Wreckage found on Thai beach

Walt has spent much of this weekend meditating [= dozing off. Ed.] so has just now seen a report of the finding, on a beach in southern Thailand, of what looks like a piece of wreckage from some sort of aircraft.

Reuters reports that villagers in the Pak Phanang district of Nakhon Si Thammart province found a large piece of curved metal, measuring about 6 feet by 9 feet, heavily encrusted with barnacles, and reported the find to authorities for identification. We have a couple of photos.

The presence of numerous barnacles suggests that the piece of metal was in the ocean for some length of time. Note the resemblance to the condition of the flaperon (a part of the wing of a Boeing 777) which washed up on the French island of Réunion in July of last year.

The site of this week's discovery is 1000s of miles east of Réunion, but only a couple of hundred miles to the northwest of the last reported radar "sighting" of the B-777 flown by Malaysian Airlines as flight MH370, which vanished in March of 2014.

The find has therefore fuelled speculation in the Thai media that the debris could belong to MH370. If this turns out to be the case, much doubt will be cast on the officially approved theory that the plane flew (either on autopilot or under the control of suicidal pilots) into the south Indian Ocean, to the west of Australia. That would mean that the "authorities" are looking in the wrong place. Which is what Walt has said all along.

We must take note, however, of the opinion of "experts" like Greg Waldron, Asia managing editor at Flightglobal, an industry publication. He is quote in the Australian meeja as saying that 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.

Mr. Waldron goes so far as to suggest that the wreckage is not from an airplane at all, but perhaps something that dropped into the sea from outer space! "The markings, engineering, and tooling apparent in this debris strongly suggest that it is aerospace related," he said. "It will need to be carefully examined, however, to determine its exact origin."

A spokesthingy for the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, the Australian authority that is overseeing the international search for MH370, told Reuters it was "awaiting results of the official examination of the material". So are the families of the hundreds of (mostly Chinese) pax on board the ill-fated flight. So are we all...

Further reading: "MH370 passengers alive and being held captive?" WWW 7/1/16