“On the plate there should be the part’s manufacturing date and batch number”, he said, adding that Boeing would have recorded the batch number when the flaperon was attached to the plane.
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If the debris found July 29 does come from Flight MH370, a Boeing 777 airliner, it would be the first physical proof that the plane flew way off course before crashing into the ocean.
Several uniformed officers loaded a large wooden crate into a van that drove with a police escort from the main wing of the Roland Garros airport to a separate hangar.
Aviation experts hope to confirm whether the airplane part – known as a “flaperon” – belonged to a Boeing 777.
A lawyer for some of the passengers’ families says if the part is confirmed to be from MH370, they will go ahead with a lawsuit against Malaysia Airlines.
Martin Dolan explained that he was “increasingly confident that the wreckage… is associated with a 777 aircraft“. Our chief investigator here told me this,”Deputy Transport Minister Abdul Aziz Kaprawi said”.
The debris washed up on the French island of Reunion, some 4000km from the oceanic region where MH370 was thought to have gone down in March previous year.
The bottle and canister were found after a local beachcomber discovered a mangled suitcase shell on Saint-Andre, the same place where the wing flap washed up. Ships equipped with submersible scanners and unmanned submarines have been crisscrossing the remote patch of the southern Indian Ocean off the coast of western Australia where the plane’s automated system last contacted telecommunication satellites.
The discovery fuelled hopes in Malaysia and across the globe that one of aviation history’s greatest mysteries could move closer to being solved, but authorities and Malaysia Airlines warned against jumping to conclusions.
The 6-foot-long wing section, identified as a flaperon, is being taken to Toulouse, France, where it was expected to arrive Saturday morning, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.
The 6-foot part was found on the French island of La Réunion in the Indian Ocean on Wednesday, Daily Mail reports.
“The location [of the debris] is consistent with the drift analysis provided to the Malaysian investigation team”, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Thursday, according to the New York Post.
Mr Truss said if the wreckage was confirmed to be from MH370, it would eliminate some of the “rather fanciful theories” about what happened to the plane.
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Search efforts for MH370, led by Australia, are focused on an area west of the Australian city of Perth – about 4,000km east of Reunion.
