Possible MH370 Wreckage Found Off Coast Of Thailand, Officials Say

A large piece of metal that washed up on a beach in southern Thailand could be wreckage from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared under still-mysterious circumstances two years ago.

Villagers found an approximately 7-by-10-foot piece of curved metal, Tanyapat Patthikongpan, a local official in Nakhon Si Thammarat province, told Reuters Saturday. The barnacle-covered object has some identifiable numbers, although Patthikongpan said local fishermen believe it could have been underwater for no more than a year.

MH370, a scheduled five-and-a-half-hour flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people on board, stopped communicating with air traffic control about an hour after departing its embarcation point just after midnight March 8, 2014. The flight was then tracked by military radar deviating from its planned northeasterly flight path and heading toward the southern Indian Ocean, where it is believed to have crashed after running out of fuel.

But despite a search effort estimated to be the most expensive in history, the only confirmed MH370 wreckage found was a flaperon — part of a wing — that washed up on the island of Reunion last July. The rest of the airplane, including its flight recorder, or “black box” — crucial to determining why it vanished — remains missing. Friends and family members of passengers on the doomed flight have grown increasingly frustrated, with five family members filing a lawsuit against the government and other agencies, accusing them of negligence.

The plane’s mysterious disappearance was one of the most widely covered news stories of 2014, most notably by CNN. Anchor Don Lemon famously wondered whether the airplane could have flown into a black hole, which a guest postulated "would suck in our entire universe."