French investigators have formally identified a washed-up piece of airplane debris found in July on a remote island in the Indian Ocean as part of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a Boeing 777 that disappeared more than a year ago with 239 people aboard.
Investigators have been examining the wing part, called a flaperon, since it was flown to a French aeronautical research laboratory near Toulouse last month.
Malaysian authorities had already declared that the wing fragment was from the jet that went missing en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, but until now French investigators could not say with certainty that it was the case.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement on Thursday that investigators used maintenance records to match a serial number found on the wing part with the missing Boeing.
“Today it is possible to state with certainty that the flaperon discovered on Reunion [Island] July 29, 2015 corresponds to that of Flight MH370,” the prosecutor’s statement said.
Cheng Liping, whose husband was on the plane, said in Beijing that she still needed to see his body and for the plane’s flight recorders, or black boxes, to be found.
“We have been anxiously waiting for such a long time and the confirmation of just one piece of debris can hardly tell us what happened to the plane,” she said yesterday.
The flight’s disappearance on March 8 last year has been one of aviation’s most confounding mysteries.
Until the wing flap washed ashore on July 30 on the French island of Reunion, investigators had not found a single physical clue linked to the missing plane, despite a massive air and sea search. Officials believe it crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, killing everyone aboard, but are unsure of the cause.
The discovery of the wing flap refocused the world’s attention on the investigation, which many hope will finally yield clues to the plane’s fate.
Australian forces are continuing their search for the plane in a desolate stretch of ocean 4,200km to the east of Reunion, where experts believe the plane crashed.
Investigators examining the wing fragment in France are trying to glean clues into the plane’s fate based on its condition, opening up even more questions: How, exactly, did the plane end up in the water? Was it a controlled landing? Was there an explosion?
Officials who scrutinized data exchanged between the plane’s engine and a satellite determined that the jetliner took a straight path across the ocean, leading them to believe that the plane flew on autopilot for hours before running out of fuel and crashing into the water.
Australian Transport Safety Bureau Chief Commissioner Martin Dolan welcomed the French report, saying: “We have been working on the assumption that the flaperon was associated with MH370.”
“It’s useful to have formal confirmation of this, so it’s good for us. But it hasn’t actually made a significant difference to our search,” he added.
Dolan said Australia was considering bringing in new vessels and equipment to take advantage of the upcoming southern hemisphere summer when the weather in the harsh and remote place will improve.
“We are currently reviewing the options available to us to see whether we will acquire other vessels and equipment for the summer period,” he said. “We haven’t made any decisions on that yet.”
Dolan said finding the flaperon in late July was consistent with drift modelling based on the plane crashing in the search area.
“It hasn’t changed our thinking about the search area,” he said, adding that the flaperon had not yielded any clues on what caused the plane to disappear en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
“All we know is that the flaperon at some point became detached from the aircraft and there are a range of possible scenarios from that,” he said.
“We will watch developments obviously, but at this stage we haven’t seen anything that actually assists in refining or changing the search area,” he said.
He said he was still confident the plane would be found in the search area, which is scheduled to have been completely combed by the end of June next year.
“There’s still a lot of territory to cover and still a very high prospect that we will find the aircraft there,” he said.
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