“This is to allow the experts to conduct more substantive analysis should there be more debris coming onto land, providing us more clues to the missing aircraft”.
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Paris: Malaysian aviation experts met French officials on Monday to coordinate the investigation into missing flight MH370, days after the discovery of a washed-up plane part offered fresh hopes of solving the mystery.
Representatives from Malaysia, the United States, China, France and Boeing are due to participate in a “verification” of the flaperon on Wednesday.
“Authorities believe the piece of metal could belong to flight MH370, which disappeared in March last year en route from Kuala Lampur to Beijing”.
The official declined to be identified because he is not authorized to speak to the media.
But reports the debris came from a plane haven’t been confirmed, and Malaysian officials have cast doubt on the object’s origin, according to the BBC.
Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said civil aviation authorities were reaching out to their counterparts in other Indian Ocean territories to be on the lookout for further debris.
The flight’s mysterious disappearance, which saw it vanish off radars as a key transponder appeared to have been shut off, has baffled aviation experts and grieving families and given rise to a myriad conspiracy theories. It arrived Saturday at a French military testing facility, where it will be analyzed by experts.
“Barnacle shells… can tell us valuable information about the water conditions under which they were formed”, said Ryan Pearson, a PhD student at Australia’s Griffith University who is studying the shell chemistry of barnacles to determine migration patterns of endangered loggerhead turtles.
But, he said, “the only 777 aircraft that we’re aware of in the Indian Ocean that could have led to this part floating is MH370″.
If confirmed to be part of MH370, the wreckage would be the first bit of physical evidence recovered from that plane.
That analysis will begin Wednesday, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.
It would also bolster Australian officials’ confidence that they are searching for the rest of the plane’s wreckage in roughly the right place, he said, as models of ocean currents make it credible that some debris would drift to the region around Reunion.
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A preliminary assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies suggested someone in the cockpit deliberately caused the aircraft’s movements before it vanished.
