The French aviation experts, including a legal expert from the field, will start their inquiry on Wednesday, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office.
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Still, given the myriad false leads that have peppered the search, some would prefer certainty to speed.
The disappearance of Flight 370 “really looks like a conspiracy”, said Jiang Hui, whose mother was on the plane. “We are just waiting again, like before”. “The agony continues and I hope there will be answers soon”.
“It’s not positive proof, but the fact that this wreckage was sighted on the northern part of the Reunion Island is consistent with the current movements, it’s consistent with what we might expect to happen in these circumstance”.
Authorities involved in the search at sea, guided by the analysis of signals from the plane that were detected by a satellite, believe it went down in the southern Indian Ocean.
Toulouse is the hub of Europe’s aerospace industry, with the headquarters of Airbus and a network of hangars and plane facilities.
French officials said the plane part will arrive over the weekend in Toulouse, where it will undergo analysis next week.
Malaysia’s Malaysia’s Deputy Minister of Transport, Abdul Aizis Kaprawi, weighed in Friday, saying the part “most certainly belongs to a Boeing 777”, but he didn’t draw any more direct connection between the part and the missing flight.
The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing vanished in March 2014. “We have long thought it went down somewhere in the Indian Ocean and, at last, it seems that we may be on the verge of some confirmation”.
“We admit, we still do hope that one day they’ll come back”, said Maira Elizabeth Nari, the 18-year-old daughter of Andrew Nari, the chief steward on the plane.
Following the discovery of the supposed debris-spotted on a pebble beach by an eagle-eyed government worker named Johnny Bègue-helicopters have been scouring Réunion, which lies around 600 Michigan east of Madagascar, for more.
The containers were a Chinese water bottle and Indonesian cleaning product.
“If you take into account the currents in the Indian Ocean, then you can trace the flow backwards from the northern part of the search zone”, he tells TIME. The lack of debris since the plane’s disappearance has previously underpinned a view that the plane was purposefully set down in the ocean in one piece. A colleague, Teddy Riviere, corroborated his account, but authorities wouldn’t say who discovered the component.
“I asked my friend to come help pick it up”.
He said he called several of his workmates and they carried the wing fragment out of the water so that it would not be battered by the surf against the volcanic rocks that make up most of the beach.
Begue also discovered a “closed” suitcase “in very bad condition” about 2.5 meters away, though it’s unclear whether there is any link to the plane wing, according to local media.
The object, which appeared to be part of a wing torn from a jetliner, has already been crated and sealed for shipment to France, a French official with knowledge of the investigations said. Truss, the transport minister, noted that there did not appear to be any marine life attached to the suitcase, indicating it probably hadn’t been in the water for long.
Aviation experts who have studied photos of the debris say it resembles a flaperon – a moving part of the wing surface – from a Boeing 777.
Investigators have found what may be a maintenance number on the wing piece, which may help investigators figure out what plane it belongs to, Truss said.
Photographs show the wing component bearing the part number “657BB”. They’ll supervise the transfer of the debris to France, and lead the search for any more. The discovery is therefore unlikely to alter the seabed search, he said.
“Australia’s priority and our responsibility is to do whatever we can to locate the last resting place of the aircraft”, Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said in a press conference in Sydney.
Over the past 16 months, hopes have repeatedly been raised and then dashed that the plane, or parts of the plane, had been found. In the end, none of them were from Flight 370. Beijing said it was following developments closely.
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“This doesn’t give hope, this is a moment I have been fearing”, he said.
