Malaysia says plane debris is from MH370 but U.S. experts remain hesitant
The discovery is the first tangible trace of the ill-fated aircraft, a Boeing 777 with 239 people aboard that vanished in March, 2014. It was found last week on the French island of RÉunion in the western Indian Ocean.
A few minutes before the news conference, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak went further, declaring that the object definitely came from the missing plane. A person involved in the investigation said, however, that experts from Boeing and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board who have seen the object – a part of what is known as a flaperon – were not fully satisfied and called for further analysis.
Their doubts were based on a modification to the flaperon part that did not appear to exactly match what they would expect from airline maintenance records, according to the person, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and requested anonymity.
French and Malaysian officials did not share the Americans’ hesitation, though, not least because no other Boeing 777 is unaccounted for.
“Today, 515 days since the plane disappeared, it is with a very heavy heart that I must tell you that an international team of experts have conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris found on RÉunion Island is indeed from MH370,” Mr. Razak said in a televised statement broadcast early Thursday in Malaysia.
At the news conference in Paris, Serge Mackowiak, the deputy Paris prosecutor, discussed what officials and experts from France, Malaysia, Australia and the United States had learned from examining the flaperon part in an aviation laboratory in Toulouse, France.
He said representatives from Boeing confirmed that the flaperon part came from a Boeing 777, based on its size, colour, joint structure and other technical characteristics. He also said that “technical documentation” provided by Malaysia Airlines enabled experts to establish “common technical characteristics” between the debris and Flight 370’s flaperons.
Boeing said in a statement that its technicians were assisting in the analysis of the part but declined to comment on the results of the examination.
The person involved in the investigation said that no serial or other unique identifying number was found, making the job of conclusively identifying the object more complicated. The person also said that so far, no burn marks or other evidence of physical damage had been found that might provide any clues about the circumstances in which the plane went down.
In any case, experts have cautioned that the discovery of the object was unlikely to tell investigators enough to determine exactly what happened to the plane.
The aircraft vanished on the night of March 8, 2014, while bound for Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. Less than an hour after takeoff, it veered off its planned course and stopped communicating with ground controllers. Radar data and satellite signals show that it turned to fly west across the Malay Peninsula and then south over the Indian Ocean, where it is presumed to have run out of fuel and crashed in very deep water, killing everyone aboard.
Months of extensive air and sea search efforts failed to find any trace of the aircraft. The authorities in Malaysia and Australia, which is leading the search, reacted cautiously after the discovery on RÉunion, wary of raising hopes after previous false leads.
There was much interest in China, where the authorities struggled in the days after the crash to contain anger among the families of the 153 Chinese citizens who were on board the flight. After a year of searches and false leads, relatives of the passengers greeted news of the discovery of the object on RÉunion with caution. And state news media warned that even if the debris proved to have come from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the body of the plane was still missing.
Officials said the piece found on RÉunion, made from composite materials with a lightweight honeycomb interior, could float for months, unlike many other parts of the plane, which are likely at the bottom of the ocean.
Australia is leading the underwater search for the plane, while the Malaysian authorities are conducting the broader investigation into the plane’s disappearance. French prosecutors have begun an investigation of their own because there were four French citizens on the flight, and the flaperon part is being examined in France because it washed up on French territory.
Warren Truss, the deputy prime minister of Australia, said in Sydney on Wednesday that the discovery did not change calculations of where to look for the plane.
