This Article is From Jul 31, 2015

Debris Alone May Not Solve Mystery of Malaysia Plane

Debris Alone May Not Solve Mystery of Malaysia Plane

The piece of debris, washed ashore on Reunion Islands, in the southern Indian Ocean.

Though the piece of airplane debris found on a remote Indian Ocean beach may yield the first tangible proof that a Malaysian jetliner that vanished almost 17 months ago crashed into the sea, experts said it may not be much help in solving the vexing mystery of where to find the plane's wreckage.

The length of time since the crash and the complex dynamics of ocean currents and fickle sea winds make it impossible to determine with any precision where the object that turned up on the French island of Réunion on Wednesday entered the water, experts said.

Officials said Thursday that it would probably take several days to establish whether the object is what it appears to be - a wing flap from a Boeing 777 aircraft - and that it came from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. French officials said Thursday that the object was being shipped to a laboratory near Toulouse for analysis.

But even if the object is authenticated, experts said, nothing about its discovery would either confirm or contradict the crash investigators' belief, based on radar data and satellite signals, that Flight 370 went down somewhere in an empty stretch of the Indian Ocean.

What the discovery would confirm, according to David G. Gallo, the director of special projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, is "that they're actually looking for a plane that went into the water."

Government officials and families of passengers lost on the flight, which vanished in March 2014 with 239 people aboard, responded warily on Thursday to the news of the discovery in Réunion, reluctant to fan hopes after more than a year of fruitless searching and false rumors.

Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia said in a statement that his government was sending teams to Réunion and to France to examine the object and meet with French aviation safety officials.

"We have had many false alarms before, but for the sake of the families who have lost loved ones, and suffered such heartbreaking uncertainty, I pray that we will find out the truth, so that they may have closure and peace," Najib said in the statement.
 
© 2015, The New York Times News Service
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