Investigators in Toulouse are hoping to unlock the mystery of the disappeared Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 as the piece of plane wreckage found washed up on a beach on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion arrived in France for official identification, reports The Guardian.
The two-metre, barnacle-encrusted chunk of metal debris which emerged from the sea this week has raised hopes of discovering what happened to the Kuala Lumpur-Beijing flight which mysteriously disappeared from radars last March, vanishing without trace with 239 people on board.
The piece of debris – known as a flaperon – arrived at Paris’ Orly airport at 6.17 am local time (0417 GMT) on Saturday on an Air France flight from the French island of La Reunion.
A police escort will accompany the two-metre (6.5 foot) part on its journey by road to a defence ministry laboratory near the southwestern city of Toulouse.
There, investigators are expected to start work on confirming whether or not it was from the missing Boeing 777 that has confounded an international search mission for over a year.
The Malaysian government said on Friday that Malaysia Airlines had confirmed that the debris was from a Boeing 777 and that investigators were now “moving close to solving the mystery of MH370”. Abdul Aziz Kaprawi, the deputy transport minister, said the debris could be “the convincing evidence that MH370 went down in the Indian Ocean”.
Earlier, Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian transport safety bureau, had said that if the wing piece did prove to be from a 777, MH370 was the only known possible source. He said authorities were “increasingly confident” the debris came from MH370.
“We are still working with our French and Malaysian colleagues to analyse all the information so we don’t have certainty yet, but we hope that within the next little while we’ll be able to get to that level of confidence. We’re hoping within the next 24 hours,” he said.