Australian investigators say they are increasingly confident that a piece of plane debris found washed up on Reunion Island is a piece of the missing Malaysia Airline flight MH370 that disappeared in March 2014 with 239 people on board.
Authorities hope to confirm the origin of the piece in the coming hours that most say they firmly believe it is from the Malaysian plane that went missing in 2014.
The two-meter-long fragment, a wing component called a flaperon, is expected to arrive in Toulouse, France, for further investigation by Saturday.
It was found Wednesday on a beach on Reunion Island, which is east of Madagascar and more than 3,500 kilometers from where the Boeing 777 was last tracked.
The debris found on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion is to be transported to France to find out whether it is from the missing airliner MH370, Malaysia’s prime minister has confirmed.
Initial reports suggest the two-metre long wreckage is very likely to be from a Boeing 777, Najib Razak said. Malaysia Airlines’ flight MH370 is the only Boeing 777 to have disappeared over an ocean.
There were 239 people on board when the plane went missing in March 2014.
Mr Najib said French authorities were taking the debris to the southern French city of Toulouse – the site of the nearest office of the French body responsible for air accident investigations the BEA) – to verify it as quickly as possible.
French authorities are studying a piece of plane debris found on Reunion Island, off the east coast of Madagascar, to determine whether it came from Flight MH370, which disappeared without a trace 16 months ago with 239 passengers and crew on board.
The debris washed up on Reunion island on Wednesday, some 4,000km (2,500 miles) from the area where MH370 is thought to have gone down.
Mr Dolan, who heads the Australian Transport Safety Bureau,has been quoted as saying he is “increasingly confident that the wreckage… is associated with a 777 aircraft.
Aviation experts who have studied photos of the debris say it resembles a flaperon – a moving part of the wing surface – from a Boeing 777.
Guided by signals from the plane that were detected by satellite, authorities believe the plane went down in the southern Indian Ocean.
However, no physical evidence of this has ever been found and in January Malaysian authorities declared that all on board were presumed dead.
