Air accident investigators are to examine a large piece of aircraft fuselage recovered from the sea-bed off the south coast earlier this week in the hope of establishing whether it was linked to any aviation tragedies off Ireland.
The three-metre piece of wheel leg - bearing the numbers 32F583 - was brought to the surface on Wednesday by the beam trawler Avon Turr as it was trawling the sea-bed 106 km (66 miles) southwest of the Old Head of Kinsale and 143 km (89 miles) southeast of Hook Head.
Kevin Humphries of the air accident investigation unit of the Department of Transport ruled out the piece of undercarriage coming from the Aer Lingus Viscount, the St Phelim, which crashed in March 1968 near Tuskar Rock off Wexford with the loss of all 61 people on board.
Mr Humphries said that all three sections of undercarriage belonging to the St Phelim were recovered in a salvage operation.
The other major civilian aircraft to crash off the Irish coast was the Air India flight 182 which went down 110 miles off the Cork coast in June 1985 with the loss of all 329 passengers and crew on board following a bomb explosion.
Mr Humphries would not speculate on whether the recovered piece might be part of that aircraft. Investigators had only just taken possession of the piece and would need time to examine it.
Mr Humphries said the Air India jumbo jet was the only other major civilian aircraft to go down off the south coast in the past 30 years that he was aware of, but he pointed out that a lot of military aircraft went down off the south coast during the second World War.
According to Michael Myler, skipper of the 38-metre Avon Turr, he and his crew of five had been beam-trawling at a depth of more than 90 metres when at about 5pm on Wednesday, they lifted their nets to discover the piece of fuselage hanging out of one of them.
"The weather was poor but she came up easy enough - it's just the leg that holds one of the wheels - she was clean enough when she came up, sort of silver in colour but she started to rust lying on the deck for two days," he said.
Mr Myler, from Ballyhack, Co Wexford, and his crew brought the piece of fuselage back to their home port of Waterford where they transferred it on to a lorry and trailer for transport to Dublin and detailed examination by air accident investigators.