MH370 debris is second shipwreck, search team say

Search teams looking for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 made a discovery, but it’s a tad older than the Boeing 777 plane they had in mind. Unfortunately, it’s still not the airplane.

Sonar first detected the wreck’s presence on December 19, the New York Times reports.

A subsequent search on January 2 yielded a shadowy image using sonar on board an autonomous underwater vehicle, that depicted a ship with a damaged hull at a depth of 12,000 feet underwater.

Experts at the Western Australian Museum said the wreck was likely a steel or iron vessel from the “turn of the 19th century”, according to the statement.

“There were characteristics of the contact that made it unlikely to be MH370”, said Peter Foley, the ATSB’s Director of the Operational Search for MH370.

An anchor and what is believed to be lumps of coal were among the debris found in the shipwreck, which is believed to be from the 1800s, the ATSB said.

The search has focused on a remote part of southern Indian Ocean, where the plane is widely believed to have gone down.

The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight has led to the discovery of another shipwreck.

No further searches will be carried out to identify the latest ship discovered because of escalating costs in the search for the plane.

With an apparently raised stern and a prominent bowsprit, the ship resembles a merchant vessel of the 18th or 19th centuries.

The only tangible evidence that MH370 met a tragic end emerged last May, when a two-meter-long piece of the wing, a so-called flaperon, washed up on Reunion, an Indian Ocean island.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau found something much older than the vanished flight, after stumbling across a 19th-century shipwreck more than two miles underwater.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau is leading the search, which involves ships scanning 46,000 miles of ocean floor, equivalent to the size of Pennsylvania. The airliner took off on March 8, 2014 and then disappeared with 239 passengers and crew on board. In fact, they have clarified that if there is no clue of the MH370 by the middle of the year, they would be inclined to stop the entire mission.