The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Debris unlikely to solve mystery of missing plane
Lab will see if wing piece was part of missing aircraft.
More than 16 months after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished en route to Beijing, experts say there is little hope that a bit of wing found on an Indian Ocean beach will unravel what happened to the 239 people on the airplane, though identification of the piece could lay to rest speculation and conspiracy theories,
More than 16 months after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished en route to Beijing, experts say there is little hope that a bit of wing found on an Indian Ocean beach will unravel what happened to the 239 people on the airplane.
The piece was being rushed Friday to a lab in southern France, where it will be examined to determine if it is what investigators believe it is: a part from the Boeing 777 aircraft that was Flight 370. According to the Paris prosecutor’s office, the official probe will begin Wednesday, news services reported.
Identification of the piece could lay to rest speculation and conspiracy theories that arose after the plane disappeared, when Malaysian officials issued contradictory statements and there was no firm evidence of where the plane had gone. Confirmation that the wing piece came from the doomed flight is not expected to help narrow the focus of a search area that is the size of Pennsylvania and almost 3,000 miles to the east of the island where the debris was found.
“Is it going to help us make the haystack smaller?” said David Gallo of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “I don’t think so.”
The wing piece, called a flaperon, was found Wednesday by workers cleaning a beach on the island of Reunion, where a dozen police officers continued to scour the site Friday for other potential wreckage from the plane. One searcher found a bottle of laundry detergent with writing in Indonesia’s main language. Another found a tattered suitcase that didn’t appear to have been adrift more than a year. The French Defense Ministry said the wing piece would be examined at a special facility used for airplane testing and analysis.
In Malaysia, the deputy transport minister, Abdul Aziz Kaprawi, confirmed Friday a part number on the debris matches numbers on a Boeing 777 aircraft.