Two-metre long piece of wreckage, which may be part of wing of Boeing 777, found on Indian Ocean island

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Aviation investigators are heading to the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean and could determine within two days whether a piece of debris on the island belongs to missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, Malaysian officials have said.

Australian officials, who are leading the seabed search for the aircraft, said on Thursday it was “entirely possible” that the debris, believed to be part of an aircraft wing, could have drifted to the island from the suspected crash site nearly 4,000km away.

An unnamed US official told Associated Press on Wednesday that air safety investigators have a “high degree of confidence” that the debris is of a wing component unique to the Boeing 777 model.



The official claims that investigators – including a Boeing air safety investigator – have identified the component as a flaperon, part of the trailing edge of a 777 wing. The officials spoke on condition that they not be named because they are not authorised to speak publicly.



The missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished at night over the South China Sea on 8 March 2014, travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.



“Whatever wreckage found needs to be further verified before we can further confirm whether it belongs to MH370,” transport minister Liow Tiong Lai told reporters in New York. “So we have dispatched a team to investigate on this issues and we hope that we can identify it as soon as possible.”

Malaysia’s deputy transport minister Abdul Aziz Kaprawi said the team included experts from Malaysia’s department of civil aviation and Malaysia Airlines, who would be joined by representatives from Boeing, maker of the 777-200 aircraft.



“We expect in two days we can complete the verification,” Abdul Aziz said.

The two-metre (6ft) piece of wreckage, which seemed to be part of a wing, was found by people cleaning up a beach, and police on the island are investigating.

The debris reportedly carried a code, reading BB670, which should help investigators quickly conclude whether there is a possible link.

For the past 15 months the search has focused on a 120,000 square kilometre stretch of seabed nearly 2,000 kilometres southwest of Perth. Martin Dolan, the chief commissioner of the Australian team co-ordinating the search, said the surfacing of debris in La Réunion “doesn’t rule out our current search area”.

“It is entirely possible that something could have drifted from our current search area to that island,” he said.

An oceanographer with the University of Western Australia, professor Charitha Pattiaratchi, told the Guardian the possibility debris from MH370 had washed up on Réunion was “consistent with the area [west of Perth] that the search team is looking at”.

“It makes sense based on some of the modelling we did 12 months ago, that some time with 18 to 24 months after [the crash] this could be the area the debris would have ended up in,” Pattiaratchi said.

He said it was difficult based on photographs of the debris to ascertain how long it had been in the ocean, but said it would have been “at least six months”.

An international search operation for the missing plane found no physical clues, but ongoing efforts have been focusing on the southern Indian Ocean west of Perth, Australia, based on faint signals picked up by satellite after the plane went missing.



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A French aviation specialist, Xavier Tytelman, who was sent the photos by a contact on Réunion, has highlighted the similarity of the debris to the flaperon on a 777, but other experts have expressed doubt whether the part is large enough to have come from a wide-bodied passenger airliner.

One UK-based air accident investigator, David Gleave, said that it was a potentially credible lead, with a plane crashing on water likely to have left this type of debris: “I have always said that a ditching was likely to lead to some trailing-edge parts of flaps floating, but they are too small to spot easily. The drift with time is credible.”

But he warned of a possible hoax, with similar parts available from aircraft scrapped for spares. Greave also queried the colour of the wing fragment, which would usually be grey rather than white, although he said sea salt deposits could be responsible.

Malaysian authorities in January declared that all the passengers on board were presumed dead. An Australian-led team has been conducting an underwater search of a 120,000 sq km zone in the Indian Ocean for over 500 days.



Boeing said it remained “committed to supporting the MH370 investigation and the search for the airplane”.