The most promising lead yet in the mystery of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 may have just been found on the island of La Reunion in the Indian Ocean, where part of an airplane wing was washed ashore.
Although the island is thousands of miles from the search area, the two-meter-long wing debris appears to be from a Boeing 777, though experts are still investigating. The Malaysian Airlines jet, which disappeared on the way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing without a trace in March last year, is the only Boeing 777 to have disappeared.
Australian Infrastructure Minister Warren Truss said that if the wreckage is identified as belonging to MH370, this "would be consistent with other analysis and modeling that the resting place of the aircraft is in the southern Indian Ocean."
Reunion Island is roughly 3,800 miles from the southern tip of Vietnam, the plane’s last known location. However, Australian officials say the wreckage could have drifted due to currents. "If there was something from MH370 it could have reached Reunion Island from the area we're covering," said Australian Transport Safety Bureau Chief Commissioner Martin Dolan. "It's not inconsistent with the drift modeling we've done. It's not inconsistent with the search area we're covering."
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CNN analyzes the likelihood that the wing part belongs to MH370:
There are at least three elements of the discovery that are consistent with MH370, said CNN safety analyst David Soucie. The first is that the part appears to have been torn off the aircraft.
"This is from a sudden impact, it looks like to me," Soucie said.
There also is a seal on the top of the part that "is consistent with what I would see on an inside flap on a triple 7," he said, and the barnacles on the part are consistent with the "parasitic activity" that would take place from being underwater so long.
Investigators have cautioned that it is still too early to tell if the debris came from the missing airliner. The families of the 12 Malaysian crew members and 227 passengers, 152 of whom were Chinese nationals, have had to endure many false alarms, from a claim that the plane was hijacked by terrorists to a string of outlandish conspiracy theories.
The story is the top trending topic on Weibo this morning, where it has drawn over 130 million views and 82,000 comments since news of the discovery broke late last night.
When the Guardian spoke to some of the family members of the missing passengers in Beijing this morning, they said they found out about the potential breakthrough on Weibo, China's Twitter-like microblogging platform, and had not been contacted by Malaysian Airlines.
“We are just telling each other to wait, just wait. We are not experts. We do not know whether the debris is from a 777 or not,” said Steve Wang, whose mother was on board the missing flight.
Another relative of a missing passenger is not holding out hope.
Cheng Liping, whose husband Ju Kun was on MH370, said: “Personally, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that they have found it. It’s been more than a year. If they were able to find it they would have already found it. Why now and why just a small piece of debris?
“Since I don’t believe it, I’m not thinking too much about it and the news has not affected my mood much,” added Cheng, whose husband was a well-known film stuntman.
Cheng, who has refused to accept the official narrative about the crash, said the find appeared to be an attempt to trick relatives.
“They [the governments and Malaysian Airlines] might want to distract us and to bring the whole thing to an end with this small find.”
[Images via BBC, Wired and the Guardian]
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