Abdul Aziz Kaprawi, the deputy transport minister, said the 2-metre barnacle-covered chunk of aircraft could be “the convincing evidence that MH370 went down in the Indian Ocean”....
Martin Dolan, the Australian man leading the search, was the first high-level official to say that the debris, known as a flaperon, was likely to have come from the missing jet, amid hopes it was the first physical evidence from the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines jet 16 months ago.
The chief commissioner of the Australian transport safety bureau said earlier that if the wing piece was from a 777, then MH370 was the only known possible source. Authorities were “increasingly confident” the debris came from MH370, Dolan said.
“We are still working with our French and Malaysian colleagues to analyse all the information so we don’t have certainty yet, but we hope that within the next little while we’ll be able to get to that level of confidence. We’re hoping within the next 24 hours.”
The wing component bears the part number “657 BB”, according to photos of the debris. Abdul Aziz said: “From the part number, it is confirmed that it is from a Boeing 777 aircraft. This information is from MAS (Malaysia Airlines). They have informed me.”
Definitive confirmation of its origin, however, could only come from Boeing, he said. The aircraft manufacturer performed modifications to the flaperon that would make it easy to identify.
The debris was to be flown to Toulouse,the centre of Europe’s aerospace industry, for identification. The Paris prosecutor’s office said the part, now at an airport on Reúnion, could arrive by Saturday morning. The French defence ministry said it would then be analysed at special defence facilities.
But there were conflicting reports on the timeframe. Local television in Reúnion said the debris might not leave the island before Sunday as a cargo plane was needed to transport it to France.
The search had gone cold after planes and ships from more than 20 countries scoured the Indian Ocean for the aircraft, which was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
An Australian taskforce has spent more than a year combing the submarine depths of the ocean for wreckage. But the first tangible evidence may have quietly washed up into the path of workers cleaning up a beach on Réunion, thousands of miles west.
Warren Truss, the deputy prime minister of Australia, which has led the ocean search, said the discovery of the flaperon was “being treated as a major lead”. But he said it would not necessarily solve the mystery of where the plane crashed or point to the location of other debris.
“After 16 months, the vagaries of the currents, reverse modelling is almost impossible,” Truss told reporters in Sydney. “And so I don’t think it contributes a great deal in as far as our knowledge of where the aircraft is located at the present time.”
For the families of the missing, the grey metal object has brought fresh grief but also the prospect of closure.
“Sometimes I hope that this is it and at times, I hope that this isn’t the plane,” Elaine Chew, the wife of steward Tan Size Hiang, told the Malaysian Straits Times. “I would fall asleep, then wake up again. I just kept thinking of the plane and Size Hiang,” she said.
“It’s starting all over again.”
Relatives of many of the 153 Chinese passengers of MH370 said they wanted authorities to be completely certain the part was from the missing plane. A statement said: “We want [the information] to be 100% positive. We care more about where our families are rather than where the plane’s wreckage is.”
French police on the overseas territory carried out a further search of the island’s coastline by helicopter in an effort to spot more debris but found nothing.
Part of a suitcase had been found by islanders not far from the plane wreckage but Australian MH370 search chiefs were cautious about any link. “From what we understand so far, there’s much less reason to be positive about the suitcase,” Dolan told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Friday. “There’s no obvious indication it’s been in the water a long time and so on.”
James Record, a Professor of Aviation at Dowling College and former commercial airline pilot, said the long wait to find a part of the plane was not surprising.
“It is a big ocean and we always knew that eventually debris from the crash would either be found by passing ships or be washed ashore somewhere,” he told the Guardian in an email. “Every piece of equipment on a plane has inventory markings of some sort – authorities will be able to cross reference the numbers on the piece of debris and if it belonged to 370, as we expect it did, have the evidence needed to confirm that.”
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