A search crew looking for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 found wreckage deep below the Indian Ocean — but it wasn’t the missing plane.
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.
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The search team initially thought it was wreckage from the plane after a sonar search turned up a man-made object on Dec. 19, the bureau said in a statement.
Using an underwater drone at the site 1,600 miles southwest from the coast of Australia, the wreck was determined to be the 200-year-old ship, likely made of steel or iron, and estimated to be 80-meters long.
“It is all but impossible to identify ships or their country of manufacture/port of origin without being able to do more detailed artifact studies, as so many have been lost over the years,” museum maritime archaeologist Ross Anderson said in a statement.
This is the second time that search crews looking for Flight 370 ended up finding lost shipwrecks instead.
Last March, officials thought they discovered the missing flight, only to learn it was a wrecked cargo ship from the same era as the most recent discovery.
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Hundreds of ships from the mid-to-late 19th century were lost during voyages across the Indian Ocean, where the missing plane vanished on March 8, 2014.
The hunt for Flight 370 has spanned for over a year now, covering more than 30,000 square miles of the sea floor.
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If officials can’t find the vanished flight’s wreckage by the middle of 2016, the search is scheduled to end.
The flight disappeared almost two years ago, taking its 239 passengers on board with it after mysteriously flying off course during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
With News Wire Services
