MH370 search: Reunion debris 'very likely' part of plane

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It is "very likely" debris found on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion is that of the missing flight MH370, a top Australian official has told the BBC.

Martin Dolan, who heads Australia's search efforts, also said the operation was continuing "in the right place" in the southern part of the ocean.

The wreckage, said to be a wing part, is to be flown to France for analysis.

The Malaysia Airlines flight - a Boeing 777 travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing - vanished in March 2014.

There were 239 passengers and crew on board the plane when it went missing.

French examination

The debris washed up on Reunion island on Wednesday, some 4,000km (2,500 miles) from the area where MH370 is thought to have gone down.

Mr Dolan, who heads the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, told the BBC that he was "increasingly confident that the wreckage... is associated with a 777 aircraft".

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Aviation experts who have studied photos of the debris say it resembles a flaperon - a moving part of the wing surface - from a Boeing 777.

"There is no other recorded case of a flaperon being lost from a Boeing 777," Mr Dolan said.

"We are confident we have the quality of the search to cover that area and find the missing aircraft," he added.

Guided by signals from the plane that were detected by satellite, authorities believe it went down in the southern Indian Ocean.

However, no physical evidence of this has ever been found and in January Malaysian authorities declared that all on board were presumed dead.

Location of a flaperon on a Boeing 777

Earlier, Australian officials and Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said the location of the debris was consistent with drift analysis provided to investigators.

The wreckage is expected to be flown to the French city of Toulouse later on Friday. French media quote officials as saying it will be examined by experts it next week.

The BBC's Chris Bockman in Toulouse says aviation authorities have a huge hangar facility to store and study wreckage - as they did with the Air France airliner that crashed on its way from Brazil to Paris in 2009.

BBC transport correspondent Richard Westcott says the object may have a data tag with a serial number that could be directly traceable to MH370. Even if there is no tag, it should have a traceable manufacturer's stamp, he adds.

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