OCEANOGRAPHERS in Germany claim the search for the wreck of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is thousands of kilometres off-beam.

A wing part from the plane that washed up a month ago on the island of Reunion “probably came from the eastern equatorial Indian Ocean,” said Andreas Villwock of the Geomar Helmholtz Centre for Oceanography in Kiel on Friday.

That would be thousands of kilometres from the previously presumed crash site at 35 degrees latitude south of the Equator.

The Kiel lab used a computer model of ocean currents to guess its drift path.

The Boeing 777 vanished on March 8, 2014 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to China with 239 people aboard including six Australians.

The Geomar institute said it would give details at a news conference on Tuesday.

French investigators strongly assume the debris found in Reunion comes from the lost jet.

The wing part, currently in Toulouse, France for examination, is a flaperon and its relatively intact condition has led many experts to speculate that the plane landed on the ocean’s surface before it sunk to the bottom.