Aircraft debris found on a French Indian Ocean island has been flown to France for analysis, with a 6ft section of wing appearing to match the model of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
Experts will seek to verify if the part came from the missing plane, but expectations are high after Malaysia’s prime minister said on Thursday that the wreckage was “very likely” to have come from a Boeing 777, the same model as the ill-fated flight.
The search for flight MH370 was joined by planes and ships from more than 20 countries when the 777 carrying 239 passengers from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing disappeared on March 8th, 2014. An Australian task force has spent more than a year combing the submarine depths of the southern Indian Ocean for wreckage. But the first physical evidence to be discovered may prove to have simply washed up into the path of workers cleaning up a beach on the island of Réunion, thousands of miles west.
Photographic and witness evidence from Réunion appears to match the part with diagrams in Boeing's 777 manual. But Malaysia's prime minister, Najib Razak – whose government has come under intense criticism from relatives of the missing – cautioned that it was too early to speculate whether the part came from the missing flight. He said that the flaperon – a moveable part on the trailing edge of the wing – would be flown to Toulouse for verification by French air accident authorities, along with a team of investigators from Malaysia.
A Malaysian team also arrived on Réunion on Thursday, the day after news of the discovery emerged. French police on the tiny overseas territory had studied the debris with local airline mechanics before alerting investigators, and carried out a further search of the island’s coastline by helicopter in an unsuccessful effort to spot more debris.
The deputy prime minister of Australia, which has led the ocean search for wreckage in the southern Indian Ocean, said that the discovery was "being treated as a major lead".
Warren Truss said: "If it is indeed wreckage from MH370, it starts to provide some closure for the families of the people on board.
“The Réunion islands are a very long way from the search area, but it is consistent with the work that has been done in identifying the current search area, the satellite interpretations of the route path that the aircraft is expected to have taken. So a discovery of wreckage in that area would not be inconsistent with that advice.”
An identifying number, BB657, found on the flaperon should allow investigators to quickly confirm whether, as specialist aviation websites appeared to demonstrate, the part did originate from a 777. A fuller maintenance stamp should register not only the generic part, but an individual serial number allowing the history of the flaperon to be traced, tallying with records held by the manufacturer and the airline. Individual parts of planes can be swapped after the original construction, and are labelled to allow aircraft engineers to track if and when they need maintenance or replacement.
Experts said that provided a full and accurate serial number exists, Malaysia Airlines would soon establish if the numbered part could have come from flight MH370 – but given the history of false starts and confusion in the long search for the missing airliner, investigators would be loth to confirm the lead before viewing the physical evidence directly.
Confirmation
David Gleave, an air accident investigator, said: "A lot of aircraft parts look very similar to other aircraft parts, and these things take time to confirm – given the amount of grief we really must make sure."
Relatives of many of the 153 Chinese passengers of MH370 said they wanted authorities to be completely certain the part was from the missing plane. A statement said: “We want [the information] to be 100 per cent positive. We care more about where our families are rather than where the plane’s wreckage is.”
For the past 15 months the search has focused on a 120,000sq km stretch of seabed nearly 2,000km southwest of Perth, Australia, identified as the likely crash site based on the last satellite pings from the aircraft and the fuel consumption of the aircraft. Martin Dolan, the chief commissioner of the Australian team co-ordinating the search, said the surfacing of debris in Reunion "doesn't rule out our current search area".
Oceanographic modelling suggests that currents could well have carried debris thousands of kilometres from the current search zone off the west of Australia in almost 17 months, and some oceanographers suggested the discovery could substantially narrow the search zone.
Dr Erik van Sebille, of Imperial College London, said that their computer simulations showed the debris would have been carried from an area a few hundred miles in diameter off the coast of northwestern Australia, making the furthest southwest sections of the search area defined by the satellite traces an “improbable location” for the crash site.
He said that finding more debris, and triangulating through further locations, could prove the best hope to finding the aircraft’s site of impact – and ultimately the black box.
– (Guardian service)