Flight 370: A barnacled bit of wreckage has investigators scrambling

BEIJING - The cold case known as Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been jolted by a piece of flotsam that washed ashore, and now investigators are scrambling again.

Authorities in France plan to examine what appears to be part of a wing that was found on a beach on Reunion, an island in the Indian Ocean, to see if it came from a plane that vanished without a trace 16 months ago.

A long-running investigation that has been forced by a lack of physical evidence to focus on satellite signals from the time of the disappearance and a slow, patient and so far fruitless sweep of remote deep seas off Australia suddenly has a new direction and a specific task.

Does a barnacle-encrusted piece of debris lead back to the Boeing 777 that is at the heart of the case?

The object will be flown from Reunion, a French territory about 2,800 miles from the search site, to Toulouse for examination.

But aviation experts and amateurs the world over are already arguing from the images broadcast on the Web that the part is indeed from that specific model of plane. Yet new questions are already flaring: There have been different descriptions of what appears to be a part number stenciled on the piece, which could be crucial to its identification.

"If it is from a Boeing 777, it can't be from anything except MH370," said Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at Virginia-based Teal Group. "I mean, no one else just happens to be missing a 777 in that region of the world."

But even in that case, it doesn't solve the mystery.

"It's consistent with an aircraft that went down in March 2014, in an area off the southwest of Australia; it all fits in with the search pattern," said Simon Boxall, an oceanographer at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. "The problem is it doesn't help us narrow the search down, we can't say we can reduce the search area. The chances of finding key bits from Flight 370 on the seafloor are still very, very remote in such a vast area and in such deep water."

A concrete link to the missing plane, if confirmed, could offer some measure of closure to the families of the 239 people on board - if those families are willing to accept the evidence. On Thursday, many were skeptical, or perhaps in denial.

Most of the passengers on the March 8, 2014, flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing were Chinese, and in Beijing several families said Thursday that they still believe, against the odds, that the missing passengers are out there, or that this is another false alarm.

They called on the Chinese news media to stop printing "hearsay" and said they were not ready to accept that the wreckage found on Reunion may be a piece of the plane.

But Malaysia's deputy transport minister, Abdul Aziz Kaprawi, told Reuters that the large, battered, and barnacled item was "almost certain" to have been a wing component known as a "flaperon" from a Boeing 777.

Once investigators at Toulouse take it apart, they will likely be able to confirm what it is and whether the piece came from MH370 almost immediately.

"There are serial numbers on so many of the internal components of a plane - numbers that you can use to trace not just to the factory where it was made but to the lot number and when it was made," said Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board.

Investigators will also be scrutinizing it for signs of how it was torn away from the wing.

"You examine the fractures and tears under a microscope and see if it's torn off a certain way," Goelz said. "From that you may be able to tell if the plane crashed nose first or flat" like a belly flop.

And while time and currents will have washed away any residue, a pattern of little pits or gashes in the metal could indicate an explosion, he said.

Experts say that if the plane went down where they think it did - off the Australian coast - it is plausible that a fragment could have drifted as far as Reunion.

"It's in the right direction for the current," said David Gallo, an oceanographer who helped lead the underwater search for Air France 447, which crashed into the Atlantic in 2009. Its black boxes were recovered nearly two years later. Gallo is now director of special projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

"The ocean down there circulates like a big tub, swirling in a counterclockwise direction," he said. "Less than half a mile an hour, over 500 days, it would have made that journey easily."

But, he added, "we will have to wait and see."