sirenianshores

This caused quite a bit of speculation during the week. It appears to have been wreckage from an F14 jet which crashed in a training accident off the Florida coast several years ago (the crew survived with minor injuries). Somehow a piece of the plane managed to get all the way to a beach in Ireland.

NORFOLK — A tail section from an F-14 Tomcat discovered on a beach in Ireland came from an Oceana-based plane that crashed 3½ years ago off Key West, Fla., the Navy confirmed Tuesday.

How it got at least 4,900 miles away, no one knows for certain.

As if it had been a corked bottle with a message inside, the find has created keen interest both in Ireland and the United States.

Speculation is that the nearly 10-foot-long triangular piece of vertical stabilizer – one of two on the jet – was floated by currents from the Gulf of Mexico near the tip of Florida to the beach in West Cork on Ireland’s southern shores.

A retired commercial airline captain, identified by the Irish Examiner as Charlie Coughlan, found the plane part Friday, according to the newspaper. He notified the Irish Aviation Authority.

Initially, it was feared that the tail fin had fallen off during a flight, until the Navy confirmed that markings on the section – including squadron insignia and a serial number – pointed to the jet that crashed off Florida on Oct. 3, 2002.

“Nobody has any idea how that vertical stabilizer got all the way up there,” Cmdr. Chris Sims, a spokesman for the Atlantic Fleet Naval Air Force in Norfolk, said Tuesday.

“It must have been floating in the water for three and a half years, or maybe something happened and the aircraft wreckage shifted and it broke off,” he said.

What is known is that an F-14 crashed when a compressor stalled in one of its engines. Both crew members safely ejected and were picked up by helicopter. They sustained minor injuries.