Wing flap possibly linked to missing MH370 arrives at French lab
A piece of plane wing that could be from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 arrived Saturday in Toulouse, France, for inspection by military aviation experts.
The 6-foot-long part, wrapped in a box and shipped as cargo, was flown from the small island of Reunion, near Madagascar, and then transported by truck to the French military site in southwestern France.
A white van, accompanied by police motorcycles and a police car, delivered the component known as a flaperon to the DGA TA aeronautical testing site.
The wing part was found Wednesday by a cleanup crew on a beach on Reunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean.
The experts, including a legal expert, will start their inquiry on Wednesday, according to the Paris prosecutor's office, the Associated Press reported. On Monday, an investigating judge will meet with Malaysian authorities and representatives of the French aviation investigative agency, known as the BEA, according to a statement late Friday.
Boeing said it is sending experts to France, and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board will join the probe, a source with knowledge of the investigation told CNN.
Pieces of a brown suitcase found Thursday near the aircraft debris will be examined at a police lab near Paris, according to the Paris prosecutor, the local Le Journal de L'ile de la Reunion reported.
Malaysia's deputy transport minister on Thursday said it is "almost certain" that the wing part came from a Boeing 777 aircraft. Air safety investigators, including one from Boeing, have identified it as a flaperon from the trailing edge of a Boeing 777 wing, a U.S. official said, according to the Associated Press. The official wasn’t authorized to be publicly identified.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, is the only missing 777 in the world.
Analysts at the French aviation laboratory in Balma hope to glean details from metal stress to see what caused the flap to break off, spot explosive or other chemical traces, and study the sea life that made its home on the wing to pinpoint where it came from.
Even if the piece is confirmed to be the first identified wreckage from Flight 370, there’s no guarantee that investigators can find the plane’s vital black box recorders or other debris. A multinational search effort has so far come up empty.
The military site examining the wing piece was also involved in analyzing debris from the Air France airliner that crashed en route from Brazil to Paris in 2009, killing 228 people, the BBC reports.