Malaysian air investigators are due in Reunion on Friday.
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Martin Dolan, who heads Australia’s search efforts, also said the operation was continuing “in the right place” in the southern part of the ocean.
A Reunion police official said the wing was found Wednesday in the Bois Rouge neighborhood of the small town of Saint Andre, and was transferred Thursday to the civil aviation authority’s offices at the airport in the island’s capital, Saint-Denis. “It was with the flaperon of the Boeing 777″, Tytleman told VOA via phone.
Malaysian officials announced a few weeks after MH370 disappeared that all evidence pointed to the plane crashing in a remote area of the Indian Ocean with no survivors, but investigators so far have not determined the cause of the tragedy. If the wing part is from the Malaysia plane, it would bolster that theory and put to rest others that it traveled north, or landed somewhere after being hijacked.
La Reunion island lies about 4,000 kilometers (2,485 miles) from the area considered the most likely impact zone.
Speaking to the BBC, oceanographer David Griffin from Australia’s national science agency said the location of where the debris was found is “consistent with where we think debris might have turned up”.
For relatives of those aboard, torn between wanting closure and believing their loved ones were still somehow alive, the discovery was yet another painful turn on an emotional rollercoaster.
“It was then that I saw a weird thing on the shore”, said Begue, who called his colleagues over to check it out.
At 7am yesterday a man, a member of the group that found the aircraft debris on Wednesday, found something else that looked like a suitcase, he said. Our chief investigator here told me this,”Deputy Transport Minister Abdul Aziz Kaprawi said”. Whether it was MH370 was not clear, he said.
“As soon as we have more information or any verification, we will make it public”.
Valborg Byfield, a scientist at the National Oceanography Centre in Britain, said there were two ocean currents which could have swept the wreckage from the crash site to La Reunion.
If the part is from the flight, experts will try to re-trace it’s drift pattern.
Malaysian experts are on their way to the island to study the plane debris.
Accident investigators appeared tantalizingly close to determining whether a piece of plane debris belongs to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, but still faced a long and complex process in trying to solve one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries.
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Boeing declined to comment on the photos, referring questions to investigators. “This shows how the ocean’s currents bring material all the way from Indonesia and beyond. All of that is going to be very important”, Rosenker said.
