By Matthew Dalton, Drew Hinshaw and Robert Wall
French air accident investigators are probing information about
plane debris that has washed ashore on Réunion island, a French
territory in the Indian Ocean, but officials cautioned it was too
soon to say whether the debris was linked to Malaysia Airlines
Flight 370, which went missing over a year ago.
The piece appeared to be from an airplane wing, a police
official in Réunion said, and measures roughly 3 meters by 1.5
meters (about 10 feet by 5 feet).
"It's not the piece of a small plane," the police official
said.
French accident investigation agency BEA said it is studying the
information in coordination with Malaysian and Australian
authorities. "It is not possible at this time to ascertain whether
the part is from a [ Boeing 777] or from MH370."
Boeing Co. declined to comment on the finding in Réunion but
said "we continue to share our technical expertise and analysis" in
the Flight 370 investigation.
Malaysia Airlines wasn't immediately available to comment.
The discovery prompted an uproar of speculation on social media
that the piece was linked to the Boeing 777 that disappeared on
March 8 last year. The flight, which took off from Kuala Lumpur en
route to Beijing, veered sharply from its intended path and was
believed to have crashed far off the coast of southwest Australia,
in the southern Indian Ocean. Search teams have failed to find any
trace of the aircraft in a 23,200-square-mile zone.
The debris also couldn't be definitively linked to other recent
aviation incidents, officials said.
Xavier Tytelman, an aviation consultant who previously worked on
maritime patrol planes for the French navy, said he had examined
pictures of the debris with colleagues and compared them to a large
number of aircraft types. "It looks like the wreckage of a 777," he
said, citing both its shape and other features visible on the
plane. Mr. Tytelman suggested the part appeared to be a flaperon, a
control surface on a plane's wing.
Mr. Tytelman said it was unclear at this point whether the part
belonged to Flight 370. Finding the debris in a location in the
Indian Ocean, even if miles from the search zone, made a connection
with the Malaysia Airlines plane a strong possibility, though, he
said.
The debris was found in the early morning on a beach near
Saint-André, a town on the northeast coast of the island, near a
sugar factory, said a receptionist at the nearby Hotel Pharest.
Jon Ostrower contributed to this article.
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