A Malaysian official announced on Sunday that the object recently found on the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean was not part of the missing Malaysia Airline Flight 370.
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The official says investigators – including a Boeing air safety investigator – have identified the component as a “flaperon” from the trailing edge of a 777 wing.
He also confirmed that the wing part had been “officially identified” as from a Boeing 777 – making it virtually certain that it was from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight. Among the assorted debris he said he had collected at the beach and could possibly have come from the plane were an inner sole from a running shoe, an old wallet and a frisbee tied with string.
The experts are expected to start their inquiry on Wednesday.
SAINT-DENIS, Reunion August 2 As experts on the Indian Ocean island Reunion studied plane debris for clues in the search for missing flight MH370, scientist Nicolas Villeneuve was making his own discovery: the island’s volcano was about to erupt.
The wing part will undergo physical and chemical analysis in the southern French city of Toulouse in a bid to prove beyond doubt that the flaperon once belonged to MH370, whose passengers have been declared presumed dead.
“This could be the convincing evidence that MH370 went down in the Indian Ocean”, he said.
In January, Malaysian authorities declared all 239 people on board MH370 presumed dead.
As a French territory, Reunion is deferring all requests for help to Paris.
Doane reports that a group of Chinese victims’ families have posted a letter online saying they are awaiting official confirmation of whether the piece of debris is indeed a part of missing flight MH370. She told CNN on Thursday: “On the one hand, I really don’t want it to be part” of finding MH370 debris, so that she could “still keep hope….”
Her voice cracking, a very emotional Bajc said she has consistently distrusted the Malaysian government and that nation’s aviation authorities because she feels the investigation into the plane’s disappearance has been handled poorly.
– We don’t know whether one of the cockpit crew was involved, considered by many experts to be the most likely explanation.
“We have to hand over the debris to the authority of the island and they will hand over it to a French center for further verification”, he said, adding that Malaysia had sent two teams to France to cooperate in the process.
While the technique could help narrow the area of the search for MH370 to within tens, or hundreds, of kilometres, it was unlikely to pinpoint an exact location, Pearson said.
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There’s the matter of figuring out where the debris came from: Reunion Island is thousands of miles from any suspected crash sites.
