Jet debris mystery will linger
Official says it will take time to confirm whether wreckage is from missing Flight 370
SYDNEY— It may be a week or more before investigators determine whether a piece of debris found on the island of Réunion came from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a French official with knowledge of the investigation said Thursday.
The object, which appeared to be a wing flap torn from a jetliner, has been crated and sealed for shipment to France, the official said, but it is not expected to reach Paris for two or three days. It would then be forwarded to an aviation laboratory in Toulouse for analysis, which could take several more days.
U.S. investigators have concluded, based on photographs and videos, that the object that washed up on Réunion, a remote French island off the coast of Madagascar, came from a Boeing 777, and Flight 370 is the only Boeing 777 known to be missing.
Still, government officials and families of passengers lost on the flight, which vanished in March 2014 with 239 people aboard, responded more warily Thursday to the discovery in Réunion, reluctant to fan hopes after more than a year of fruitless searching and false rumours.
Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss of Australia, whose country has led the search for the missing jet, said in Sydney that the discovery of the object thousands of kilometres from the search area was “a very significant development.” He said investigators were “seeking to get assurance about what has been found and whether it is indeed linked to the disappearance of MH 370.”
But, he cautioned, “It is too early to make that judgment.”
Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia said in a statement that his government was sending a team to Réunion and another to Toulouse to see the object and meet with French aviation safety officials.
“We have had many false alarms before, but for the sake of the families who have lost loved ones, and suffered such heartbreaking uncertainty, I pray that we will find out the truth, so that they may have closure and peace,” Najib said in the statement. “I promise the families of those lost that whatever happens, we will not give up.”
The object, reported to be about 2.5 metres long and one metre wide, was discovered by workers cleaning a beach on the island, which is more than 4,000 kilometres from the area off Western Australia where the search for debris from Flight 370 has been focused.
Australian officials said that the search in that area would continue and that it was possible that ocean currents and winds could have car- ried floating debris to Réunion from there. The French Justice Ministry and the Réunion authorities said in a joint statement Thursday that “at this stage, the origin of the debris is not identified.”
Truss said that a number found on the part, BB670, would help identify it through maintenance records and that scientists were examining photographs of barnacles on the object to estimate how long it had been in the ocean.
If it is authenticated as part of the missing jet, the object’s discovery could substantially change some thinking about the mystery of Flight 370, both because of where and when it was found and because of its condition.
One of the possibilities that haunted the search and rescue operation for Flight 370 in the weeks after it vanished was the chance that the plane might have landed largely intact on the water somewhere and that passengers might have escaped onto the plane’s life rafts, only to perish because searchers were initially looking in waters thousands of kilometres away from where experts now believe the aircraft ended up.
But Peter Marosszeky, a prominent Australian aircraft engineer and executive who advised Boeing on the development of the 777 jet, said that the severe damage visible on the object pointed to a powerful impact with the ocean.
“Looking at the part, just the photo, suggests the part separated from the aircraft violently,” Marosszeky said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “Looking at the part, it’s pretty clear the aircraft didn’t survive; it was completely destroyed.”