The discovery on Reunion island this week of a wing fragment believed to be from a Boeing 777 offers the tantalising prospect of a breakthrough in the mysterious disappearance of flight MH370. Reverse drift analysis of the fragment suggests it emanated from the area off the West Australian coast where the Boeing 777 operated by Malaysian Airlines is believed to have crashed nearly 17 months ago. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has said the 2m-long fragment is "very likely" to be from a Boeing 777 – and the fact that no other 777 went missing over the Indian Ocean or crashed in the region around the time of MH370's disappearance strengthens that supposition.
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Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss, spokesman for the federal government's Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre, says the flaperon's discovery in the west of the Indian Ocean is a "major lead". But he has played down the likelihood that it will allow for an accurate reckoning of the specific crash location. His skepticism is well-founded. Ocean current analysis can provide investigators with useful leads, but current flows, and indeed the direction of those flows, vary from place to place. Surface winds can be even more erratic and unpredictable. According to oceanographers, the longer an object is in the water, the more difficult it becomes to determine its point of origin with any precision.
The MH370 search zone originally encompassed about 60,000 square kilometres along an arc in the southern Indian Ocean. Since the locator beacons in the plane's black boxes ceased transmission shortly after the crash, searchers settled on a strategy involving mapping the ocean floor and then launching deep-water search operations with three vessels employing side scan sonars, underwater video, and aviation fuel detection sensors. In April, the JACC announced that with more than 55,000 square kilometres having been mapped and scanned, the search area would be roughly doubled in size to 120,000 square kilometres.
The Reunion discovery is unlikely to result in any significant change to the broad thrust of the current search effort, though more thorough drift analysis may identify areas considered more promising than others. More crucially, the find will give searchers (and the governments funding their efforts) renewed hope at a time when there has been speculation that efforts might be wound back.
For the families of the 239 people on board MH370, the discovery of the "flaperon" would seem to dash any slim hopes that the plane may have landed safely somewhere and that there are survivors. But conjecture as to the passengers' real fate will continue. What this does give is the opportunity for at least a little more informed speculation. Since this is the first trace of debris, it might be suggested the plane impacted the water relatively intact, with larger sections of it sinking relatively quickly. As well as explaining why no bodies have been recovered, this scenario could support the theory that the plane met with foul play, most likely from a flight crew member.
Had MH370 been afflicted by catastrophic mechanical failure, it could have been expected to impact the water at high speed, leaving a great more debris (much of it smaller and lighter than a flaperon) to float away and perhaps to be discovered before now. Unfortunately, the delay in narrowing the search area to the southern Indian Ocean ensured evidence pointing one way or other was lost.
Further debris may wash up on Reunion or nearby Madagascar allowing investigators partial glimpses into the fate of MH370. Ultimately, however, only the discovery and retrieval of the Boeing's cockpit voice and flight data recorders will reveal what really happened. And even then, we may never know why the airliner unexpectedly departed from its planned track across the South China Sea and why its transponder was switched off, causing the plane to disappear off air traffic controllers' radar screens. The total length of the recording on Boeing 777 cockpit voice recorders is two hours, and it's estimated MH370 continued in the air for about four hours after its last confirmed location.
Everything about the search for MH370 is extreme: the size of search area, the depth of the water being scanned – up to 5000 metres – and (frequently) the weather conditions. That's an unlikely scenario for success. But with the discovery on Reunion, the families of the passengers may well be forgiven for feeling that answers could be close to hand.
