Experts now have “very strong presumptions” that the airplane part that washed ashore last week is a piece of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a French official said on Wednesday at a Paris news conference after the experts had examined the object.
The discovery is the first tangible trace of the ill-fated aircraft, a Boeing 777 with 239 people aboard that mysteriously 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, Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia 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 National Transportation Safety Board who have seen the object — a part of what is known as a flaperon — were not yet 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 in the early hours of 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.
05/08/15 Aurelien Breeden and Nicola Clarkug/New York Times
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The discovery is the first tangible trace of the ill-fated aircraft, a Boeing 777 with 239 people aboard that mysteriously 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, Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia 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 National Transportation Safety Board who have seen the object — a part of what is known as a flaperon — were not yet 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 in the early hours of 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.
05/08/15 Aurelien Breeden and Nicola Clarkug/New York Times
