French and international investigators on Thursday began examining a fragment of a Boeing 777 wing that washed up on Réunion last week, hoping that it can provide clues to the fate of the Malaysia Airlines flight that vanished almost 17 months ago.

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From identifying the barnacles clinging to the wing section to analysing the microscopic stresses in its metal casing, investigators hard at work at an aeronautic facility near Toulouse in southern France are hoping to narrow the focus of the probe into what happened to the missing jet and the 239 people on board.

Metal analysts at the French Defence Procurement Agency, which is conducting the analysis, should be able to determine whether the plane crashed vertically or horizontally and at low or high speed ̶ indicating whether the crash was deliberate or whether the pilots tried to level the plane out as it headed into the ocean.

Jean-Paul Troadec, the former head of France’s BEA civil aviation investigation bureau, said experts would also examine how the two-metre-long section ̶ known as a flaperon ̶ detached itself from the rest of the wing.

"Was it in a violent impact with the sea or not?" he asked. "This piece looks like it is in good condition, it doesn't look like the part of a plane that fell vertically into the water at 900 kilometres (600 miles) an hour."

Troadec added that investigators will also be looking for traces of an explosion or fire, which could indicate a bomb was involved.

Investigators will likely start by putting slices of the metal wing under a high-powered microscope, since its crystal structure can provide clues to how it deformed on impact, said Hans Weber, president of TECOP International, Inc., an aerospace technology consulting firm.

“A full physical examination, using ultrasonic analysis" will probably come next, "before they open it up to see if there’s any internal damage”, Weber told Reuters.

“That might take quite a while. A month or months,” he added.

Only the recovery of the plane’s black boxes will determine for certain what happened to the flight, and aviation industry specialists cautioned against expecting too much from the latest find.

“Debris such as the flaperon can only increase our understanding of the last seconds of the flight,” said Greg Waldron, Asia managing editor at industry publication Flightglobal.

French air crash investigators already have some experience with deep-water crashes. Air France Flight 447 disappeared overnight on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on June 1, 2009. The plane's black boxes were recovered nearly two years after the plane crashed into the southern Atlantic Ocean and a final investigative report was only released in July 2012.

Zeroing in on crash location

Among the most important details investigators hope to uncover are the location of the rest of the plane, based on where the wing part washed up and an analysis of the tides that carried it there.

Specialists in the ocean life and currents of the Indian Ocean are being brought in to help with the inquiry.

For months, searchers have identified the most likely crash site as being within an enormous 120,000-square-kilometre (46,000-square-mile) swath of ocean west of Australia.

The debris was found 2,300 nautical miles (3,700 kilometres) east of the search zone.

"Now we can do a reverse calculation, from a sure location ̶ the island of Réunion ̶ to make the zone as small as possible," Jean Serrat, a French ex-pilot and analyst, told BFM television on Thursday. "We are looking at a more realistic, more limited zone."

Depending on the species of barnacles found on the flaperon, investigators may be able to estimate where the piece has been, scientists said. If the barnacles are found to be from the Lepas family, "we can then say with certainty that the accident took place in cold maritime areas to the southwest of Australia", geologist Hans-Georg Herbig told AFP.

The presence of other species would indicate the wing part washed up from a different part of the ocean.

"If it has cold-water barnacles on it, that might tell them it went down further south than they think,” said Shane Ahyong, a crustacean specialist at the Australian Museum. “Or if it's got only tropical barnacles, that might tell them it went down further north.”

'Good night'

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 was last heard from on a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in the early hours of March 8, 2014. As it left Malaysian airspace, the last communication, thought to be from the co-pilot, indicated nothing out of the ordinary.

After MH370 complied with a request from air traffic controllers to increase altitude, the control tower bids the flight good night.

"Good night Malaysian three seven zero," the pilot responds.

London-based satellite-communications firm Inmarsat has said that MH370 continued to transmit its location automatically for more than five hours after it disappeared from radar. The location signals MH370 transmitted on the Inmarsat network indicated that the plane was several miles west of its planned route.

Investigators believe that someone may have deliberately switched off the aircraft’s transponder, diverted it off course and deliberately crashed into the sea. But analysts have not ruled out the possibility that the plane encountered mechanical problems or that those aboard were incapacitated as the plane veered off course before eventually crashing.

Troadec warned that even a highly successful debris analysis was unlikely to reveal why the plane mysteriously diverted from its intended flight path.

"One should not expect miracles," he said.

(FRANCE 24 with AP, AFP and REUTERS)

Transcript of the last communication with Flight MH370

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