Suspected Flight 370 wing flap arrives at French facility

BALMA, France – A wing flap suspected to be from the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 arrived Saturday at a French military testing facility where it will be analyzed by experts.

After a 10-hour journey by road from Paris’ Orly airport, a truck carrying the roughly 8-foot component known as a flaperon arrived at the DGA TA aeronautical testing site near Toulouse, accompanied by police motorcycles and a police car.

French aviation experts will try to establish whether the wreckage that was found on the Indian Ocean island Reunion comes from the Boeing 777 that disappeared on March 8, 2014, while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

The experts, including a legal expert, will start their inquiry Wednesday, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office. Monday, an investigating judge will meet with Malaysian authorities and representatives of the French aviation investigative agency, known as the BEA, according to a statement late Friday.

Air safety investigators, including one from Boeing, have identified the component as a flaperon from the trailing edge of a Boeing 777 wing, a U.S. official said. Flight 370 is the only missing 777 and many are convinced the flap comes from the ill-fated jet.

“In the aeronautic community, there is no (doubt) on the issue of what the debris belongs to. We are all convinced that it belongs to this flight (370),” aviation security expert Christophe Naudin said on France’s BFM-TV.

He said only three 777s have crashed since 2013 and the other two were in completely different locations.

Associated Press