If you want to hide something from a black man, put it in writing.


An aircraft part that washed ashore on an island in the Indian Ocean last week is from long-missing Flight 370, Malaysian officials said, making it the first concrete evidence of the plane that disappeared 17 months ago in one of the world’s most confounding aviation mysteries.

Identifying the part, a section of the wing found on the shore of Réunion Island, is a major break for the multinational probe into the plane’s disappearance, but it so far hasn’t yielded clues about the cause of the plane’s apparent crash. Experts will now examine the piece to try to determine how it broke off the plane.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak confirmed the piece’s origin in a brief statement early Thursday in Kuala Lumpur. Without taking questions, the prime minister vowed to “do everything within our means to determine what happened” to Flight 370.

French authorities, who took possession of the part because Réunion is a French territory, were more guarded about the certainty of the finding, saying only it was very likely that the plane part came from Flight 370 and that analysis would continue on Thursday.

The analysis of the piece could take weeks, and experts said it almost certainly wouldn’t be enough to answer the fundamental enigma of the flight: Why did a sophisticated jet, flying in calm weather, cease most communication with the outside world, turn off course and fly for thousands of miles over the Indian Ocean?

After Malaysia confirmed a wing part found on Réunion Island was from MH370, some relatives of the missing passengers are still doubtful, thanks to a distrust of the government since the beginning of the search.

To answer that question, investigators would have to find other pieces of the plane, particularly those containing the jet’s black boxes, which record conversations in the cockpit and the flight data. Those parts are probably lying somewhere at the bottom of the Indian Ocean under thousands of feet of water, investigators have said. Australian ocean modeling has showed that some debris could have drifted thousands of miles west toward Réunion from the area where investigators believe the plane went down.

Still, the piece, which washed ashore on the French island about 500 miles off the east coast of Madagascar, gives new life to the investigation at a time when Australian officials had been contemplating ending the search. Prime Minister Tony Abbott said early Thursday that the country has no plans to scale back its efforts.

The discovery of the debris has reignited pain for those who lost loved ones on the flight.

“For a lot of us, today may be the worst day of our lives since March 8, because it takes away this sense of hope we’ve held on to for all these months,” said Grace Nathan, whose mother, Anne Daisy Nathan, was a passenger.

Analysis of the debris now moves into a new stage, safety experts say, as the French technical team tries to extract clues from the part about how the plane may have crashed.

“This is indeed a major breakthrough for us in resolving the disappearance of MH370,” Malaysia Airlines said. “We expect and hope that there would be more objects to be found, which would be able to help resolve this mystery.”

In a statement on Thursday, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying expressed sympathies to the families and urged the Malaysian government to continue investigating the cause of the incident and to protect the rights and interests of families involved.

Safety experts anticipate weeks of extensive laboratory effort, including microscopic and ultrasonic examinations to try to determine precisely what forces broke the part, known as a flaperon, off the wing. From that data, investigators hope to get closer to deducing the possible speed and angle of the aircraft as it hit the water.

But that may stretch the capabilities of scientists and engineers, according to safety experts, because the part is a relatively small portion of the wing and may not represent the aerodynamic and impact forces likely to have affected the rest of the plane.

“Establishing how it probably separated,” according to Robert Matthews, a former senior Federal Aviation Administration safety official, “is a far cry from determining what happened” to the rest of the plane.

Furthermore, safety experts doubt that the piece, by itself, will go a long way to determining the central mystery of why the flight, which disappeared on March 8, 2014, veered sharply off its intended flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The plane turned hard to the west and then flew steadily south toward a remote corner of the Indian Ocean.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said a piece of aircraft debris found on Reunion Island is indeed from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370. But the French team investigating the wreckage stopped short of confirming that the part is from MH370.

“The analysis of this piece will not answer why this aircraft departed from its route,” said Jean-Paul Troadec, the former director of the French air accident investigation office.

Structural analysis of the flaperon could answer some questions about the final seconds of the flight. “We may have some indication on the way the part detached from the wing,” Mr. Troadec said, including whether it was caused by an explosion or shock from striking the ocean.

Mr. Troadec echoed the view the current search zone remains the most likely area the plane went down. Biological analysis of barnacles that have collected on the flaperon could provide more information on where the part traveled, Mr. Troadec said, even as he doubted it would yield very precise coordinates.

Aviation investigators suspect that someone on Flight 370 intentionally diverted the plane with 239 people on board and then directed it toward the Indian Ocean.

For investigators, the best chance of determining with any certainty why the plane went off course remains finding its black boxes, the cockpit voice and flight data recorders that store vast amounts of information on a flight.

Malaysian authorities confirm that debris found on Réunion Island is from Flight 370, which is believed to have crashed off the southwest coast of Australia in March 2014.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/mh370-search-plane-debris-on-reunion-island-confirmed-as-missing-malaysia-plane-1438798524