Malaysia official joins South African aviation forum to urge careful handling of new fragment

Photos of what may be part of the trailing edge structure of the wing of missing airliner MH370 have been published by the South African aviation forum Avcom.

The barnacle encrusted part was apparently found on Friday morning, January 27, on a beach on the Transkei coast near East London.

Avcom is showing four images as well as comparative photos of the intact trailing wing area of a Boeing 777 similar to the one that was operating Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 on March 8, 2014, when it disappeared with 239 people on board on a flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing.

The governments of Australia, Malaysia and China recently ‘suspended’ the sea floor search for MH370 after the ATSB concluded that an additional zone of the South Indian Ocean most likely contained the sunk wreckage of the 777-200ER jet.

This perverse and counter intuitive decision has been widely criticised, including by the next of kin of those on board and the ATSB itself.

There is an interesting and technically informed discussion on the Avcom site as to whether the object is from MH370. The combination of very thin gauge aluminium alloy and honeycomb composite material shown in the photos is widely used in airliners built from the 1980s onwards.

A Malaysian aviation official has joined the Avcom site after spotting the post and provided his Kuala Lumpur contact details and urged the careful preservation of the recovered item.

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