Malaysia seeks help in finding more possible MH370 debris

Malaysian officials said they are reaching out to authorities in territories near Reunion Island to allow experts to conduct more substantive analysis should more debris surface.

A wing flap suspected to be from the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was found Wednesday on Reunion.

Technical experts, including from US aerospace giant Boeing, will begin from Wednesday examining the wing component, which is likely to have come from the doomed Malaysia Airlines flight as no other such plane is known to have crashed in the area.

Lai said in a statement on Sunday that representatives from Malaysia, the US, China, France and Boeing would take part in the verification of the flaperon.

More pieces of metal debris found washed up on Reunion were taken into police custody on Sunday but it is too early to say what they are, said a source close to the French investigation.

MH370 disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014.

But Roland Triadec, a local oceanographer, said La Reunion represented only “a pinhead” in the Indian Ocean and the likelihood of other debris washing up there was low.

An Air France flight carrying the debris landed at Orly airport near Paris at 0417 GMT, and it was then transferred by road to a military-run laboratory near the southwestern city of Toulouse that specialises in analysing aviation wreckage.

But reports the debris came from a plane haven’t been confirmed, and Malaysian officials have cast doubt on the object’s origin, according to the BBC.

If the barnacles prove to be older than the time passed since the disappearance of MH370, the plane would be ruled out as a source of the discovered fragment. – We don’t know why the plane’s tracking systems were switched off and by whom, an act that Malaysia has said appeared to be “deliberate”.

It would also bolster Australian officials’ confidence that they are searching for the rest of the plane’s wreckage in roughly the right place, he said, as models of ocean currents make it credible that some debris would drift to the region around Reunion.

The French General Directorate of Armament, which is analyzing the debris, has sophisticated equipment and expertise to quickly identify the plane the debris belongs to and what happened to it.

About two-thirds of those aboard Flight 370 were Chinese.

A preliminary assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies suggested someone in the cockpit deliberately caused the aircraft’s movements before it vanished.