Remains of Two 19th Century Merchantmen Found During MH370 Search Identified
Four years after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing searchers looking for the missing plane have found something else.
Marine specialists have identified two shipwrecks found during the hunt for the Malaysian airliner in a remote part of the Indian Ocean as 19the century coal ships, Agence France Presse reported.
"Both wrecks were in fact 19th century merchant sailing ships — one wooden and one iron — both carrying coal," Ross Anderson, Western Australian Museum’s curator of maritime archaeology, said.
He added that each vessel was crewed by up to 30 people.
Based on information provided by mostly British shipping sources, Anderson said the wooden ship could be the W. Gordon, which vanished while traveling from Glasgow, Scotland to Adelaide, Australia in 1876, or the Magdala, traveling from Penarth in Wales to Ternate in Indonesia.
"For the iron ship the barques Kooringa (1894), Lake Ontario (1897) and West Ridge (1883) are possible, with the West Ridge best fitting the evidence," he added.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 became the world's greatest aviation mystery when it disappeared without a trace four years ago.
The Boeing 777 jumbo jet had 239 passengers and crew on board when it dropped from radar screens on March 8, 2014 with a thorough analysis of the plane’s last moments suggesting that it went down at high speed apparently without a pilot in control.
Only 33 pieces of wreckage were found in the course of the three-year search for the missing plane which focused on deep-sea areas near the suspected crash site in the Indian Ocean and scanning the water from the air.
- Source : Sputnik
