MH370: Reunion debris ‘very likely’ from missing plane
Australian officials say they are “more and more confident” that parts of an aircraft wing found washed up on Reunion Island are from the missing Malaysian Airlines jet.
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The Boeing 777 jet disappeared on 8 March last year en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.
An 8ft long wing surface known as a flaperon and a fragment of luggage were found on a beach on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion last week.
The debris is due to be examined by experts at a military unit in Toulouse this weekend.
Malaysian officials are heading to Reunion, a French overseas department east of Madagascar, to look for more debris.
The chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said on Saturday that it was “very likely” that the fragments were part of MH370.
Martin Dolan said: “We are at this stage where we think it’s very likely (that debris is from MH370), certainly confirmed as our Malaysian colleagues have said, to be coming from a triple-7 and we are not aware of any other instance where this sort of component has been lost from a triple-7 aircraft.
“We still need to check that to be absolutely certain, but things are looking very positive.”
He added: “We’ve had a good working relationship over many years with our French counterparts. We’re happy to rely on them.
“It’s possible we will send someone to Toulouse as there’s further investigation of this part to see for example how it might have separated from an aircraft and so on, and see if that gives us useful information for our search.
“We’re expecting it will be reasonably quick. There’s just some Ts to be crossed and Is to be dotted at this stage, rather than detailed examination.
“Does this relate to MH370? We’re at the stage where we’re getting more and more confident that it is.
“Having finally confirmed that, then we will take a look at this, working with our colleagues and saying: ‘Right, what’s happened to it, therefore how did it separate from the aircraft, what might that mean for our assumptions about what happened to this aircraft at the end of its flight?’
The ATSB is in charge of efforts to locate the wreckage of the aircraft in the Southern Indian Ocean.
Mr Dolan said that even though the debris was found off the African coast, Australian authorities will not be changing their search area.
Ocean modelling predicted that currents would eventually carry any floating wreckage to the African coast from its suspected crash site.