Australia has sent an expert to France to help examine the recently found aircraft wreckage and determine if it belongs to the vanished Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, a senior official said Wednesday.
Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said the expert from Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) will join the French- and Malaysian-led international investigation team today in Toulouse, France, to work on this issue together.
An aircraft wreckage was found last Wednesday on the coast of Saint-Andree of the island of La Reunion, overseas department of France in the Indian Ocean.
The debris is about 2-2.5 meters long, and will be checked by experts at the military-run General Directorate of Armaments in Toulouse suburbs.
Malaysian authorities, who are responsible for investigating the disappearance of MH370, have confirmed the component retrieved is a flaperon from a Boeing 777 aircraft.
"Work is being undertaken by the Malaysian and French authorities to establish whether the flaperon originated from MH370... Malaysian and French officials may be in a position to make a formal statement about the origin of the flaperon later this week," Truss said in a statement.
Based on the drift modeling commissioned by the ATSB, he said, material from the current search area could have been carried to La Reunion, as well as other locations, as part of a progressive dispersal of floating debris through the action of ocean currents and wind.
"For this reason, thorough and methodical search efforts will continue to be focused on the defined underwater search area, covering 120,000 square kilometers, in the southern Indian Ocean," he said.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went missing en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with a total of 239 passengers on board, most of them Chinese nationals.
