Australia: Debris found off Reunion is ‘major lead’ in MH370 search

The debris, found in the Indian Ocean Wednesday, appears to have come from a Boeing 777 – the model that was Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 when it disappeared a year ago.

Air safety investigators, however, have a “high degree of confidence” that the debris is from a Boeing 777 – the same type of aircraft as the missing plane, according to a US official.

MH370 disappeared in March last year, with six Australians among those on board, while travelling from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to Beijing.

On Wednesday, investigators said it is too soon to tell if new debris found on an Indian Ocean Island is from the missing airliner.

Truss added that he hoped identifying the debris would bring some closure to the families of those on board the flight.

After a 10-month intensive undersea search for the vanished flight, on January 29 Malaysia declared that Flight MH370 was lost in an accident, with all on board killed.

“If it is a 777 part, it’s most likely from MH370”, he said.

While identifying the debris as part of the missing plane won’t make it easier to find, Truss said it would help put some of the theories about the flight to bed. However, Australian Maritime Safety Authority CEO Mick Kinley in an earlier interview with IHS Maritime stressed the search in Australian waters had got underway belatedly because the plane initially was being thought to have crashed en route to Vietnam.

Boeing declined to comment on the photos, referring questions to investigators. The US and French officials spoke on condition that they not be named because they aren’t authorized to speak publicly.

Flaperons are located on the rear edge of both wings, about midway between the fuselage and the tips. So far – did the plane land halfway?

Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi, of the University of Western Australia Oceans Institute, told APTN that finding a piece the debris on Reunion was “entirely consistent with current patterns in the Southern Indian Ocean to be originated from the area that they’re doing the current search for the wreckage“.

“So you can draw a flawless circle basically from the current search area, which is about 1,800 km south-west of Perth, all the way around to Reunion Island”, he added.

In what appeared to be the biggest breakthrough in the nearly 17-month search for the Boeing 777, the debris, which locals said was “covered in shells”, was found during a clean-up of a beach on the east coast of the French island, about 100 miles from Mauritius and 4000 miles from the aircraft’s last known location. “It just confirms that the airplane is in the water and hasn’t been hijacked to some remote place and is waiting to be used for some other objective…”

Truss said while Reunion Island was about 4,000km from the search site in the southern Indian Ocean, it was entirely possible that wreckage could have floated that far in the 16 months since the plane’s disappearance.