After 16 fruitless months of search, investigators hunting for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight may have got their first real break when debris, which experts believe could be from MH370, washed up on the French Reunion Island off Madagascar on Wednesday. The object, believed to be part of a wing, has been flown to Paris. From there it will be transported to a defence ministry laboratory in Toulouse for analysis.
MH370, travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, vanished on March 8 last year with 227 passengers and 12 crew on board. The disappearance without a trace sparked one of aviation’s greatest mysteries. All that investigators know for sure is this: Whoever was operating MH370 went to great lengths to avoid being detected by shutting off the plane’s transponder and a text-to-ground messaging system before turning the Boeing 777-200 off its course to Beijing.
What are the odds now of locating the missing plane?
Experts have said the 2m object washed up on the beach could be a moveable piece of a Boeing 777’s wing, called a flaperon. Boeing engineers studying photos of the piece have reportedly determined that the part came off a 777.
Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, said the agency was “increasingly confident that this debris is from MH370”. However, he also said the discovery of debris might not help pinpoint where the plane went down.
Australian officials and Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak have said the location of the debris on La Reunion was consistent with drift analysis provided to investigators. But “at this stage it is too early to speculate,” Razak said. “We have had many false alarms before.”
Of course, just one piece of wreckage on its own doesn’t yield a lot of information to solve the great MH370 mystery. But a team from Malaysia Airlines has already arrived in Toulouse and French officials say analysis of the wing-part, along with a fragment of luggage that was also found nearby, should begin on Wednesday. The Toulouse centre was also involved in analysing debris from the Air France flight, which crashed while travelling from Brazil to Paris in 2009, killing 228 people.
Boeing is sending experts to France. The US National Transportation Safety Board is also expected to take part in the probe and a preliminary report could come as early as next week.
Sonar-equipped submersibles have swept through more than 26,000sq km of the ocean floor where MH370 is believed to have crashed. So far, they have found no trace of the wreckage. But Tony Abbott, Prime Minister of Australia, which has been leading efforts to locate debris in some of the deepest and most remote parts of the Indian Ocean, said in March he was reasonably confident the plane would eventually be found.
After 500 days of an emotional rollercoaster, the families and friends of the missing passengers and crew of MH370, may be hoping Abbott will be proven right very soon.
