Flight 370 wing flap expected to arrive at French site

French authorities have imposed extraordinary secrecy over the 2-meter (6-foot) long piece of wing, putting it under police protection in the hours before it left the island of Reunion en route to the French military site east of Toulouse.

A wing fragment found this week and believed to be from the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared more than a year ago with 239 people on board, has arrived in France for analysis.

The 6ft-long wing flap, which experts believe comes from a Boeing 777 like the Malaysian Airlines plane, was half covered in sand and had barnacles encrusted on its edges.

A piece of airplane debris discovered this week on the French island of Reunion was to be loaded Friday onto a plane bound for France.

Philippe Sidam, head of an association that maintains the Bois Rouge beach near where the aircraft wing was found Wednesday, said the ocean currents bring all kinds of debris.

Toulouse is the hub of Europe’s aerospace industry, with the headquarters of Airbus and a network of hangars and plane facilities.

Australian search authorities, which are leading the hunt for the Boeing 777 aircraft in the Indian Ocean some 4,000km from La Reunion, said they were confident the main debris field was in the current search area. The official wasn’t authorised to be publicly identified.

He stated he referred to as a number of of his workmates they usually carried the wing fragment out of the water in order that it might not be battered by the surf towards the volcanic rocks that make up a lot of the seashore.

France’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement Thursday that the origin of the wing part remains unclear, and that the French justice system now has responsibility for it and will cooperate with global authorities investigating last year’s disappearance of MH370.

In the wake of the discovery, a tattered piece of luggage was also found on the same beach. Colleague Teddy Riviere corroborated his account, and praised him for the invention. Members of Begue’s soccer team kidded him on his new fame in local media.

He said whilst very unlikely that a piece of 777 aircraft could end up in the sea except through a catastrophic event in flight, it is not impossible that it might be a spare part that was being carried on a shipping container, for example. A French law enforcement helicopter is scouring the waters around the island in hopes of spotting more debris, and U.S. investigators are examining a photo of the debris.

Australian officials expressed skepticism on Friday that the suitcase was associated with the wing part. The Malaysian government also said on Friday that the serial number found on the debris showed that the part was from a Boeing 777.

Though authorities are still determining whether the plane piece came from Flight 370, Begue said Thursday night, “We are going out in the morning to start making a memorial”. Dolan said search resources would be better spent continuing the seabed search with sonar and video for wreckage rather than reviving a surface search for debris if the part proved to be from Flight 370.