Malaysian MH370 - Part may have been found - Apple looked for signals emitted from the plane - Curt Lewis

Missing MH370: Possible Boeing 777 Part Found Off Mozambique, Sources Say

An object that could be debris from a Boeing 777 has been found off Mozambique and is being examined by investigators searching for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, sources told NBC News.

Early photographic analysis of the object suggests it could have come from the doomed jet, which vanished almost exactly 2 years ago.

It was found on a sandbank in the Mozambique Channel - the body of water between Mozambique in eastern Africa and Madagascar - and in the same corner of the southern Indian Ocean where the only confirmed piece of debris, a flaperon, was found last July.


Location of possible Boeing 777 parts found that could be from MH370. NBC News

Investigators in Malaysia, Australia and the U.S. have looked at photographs of the latest object and sources say there is a good chance it derives from a Boeing 777.

Boeing engineers are looking at the photos, according to sources, but the company has declined to comment.

The object has the words "NO STEP" on it and could be from the plane's horizontal stabilizer - the wing-like parts attached to the tail, sources say. It was discovered by an American who has been blogging about the search for MH370.

The development comes days ahead of the second anniversary of the jet's disappearance en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014 with 239 people on board.


Possible Boeing 777 parts found that could be from MH370.

No trace has been found of Flight MH370 except for the single barnacle-encrusted flaperon that washed up on the eastern shore of Reunion, east of Madagascar, last July. French aviation experts verified it as part of aircraft 9M-MRO after more than one month of forensic analysis at a laboratory near Toulouse.

There have been false hopes over the course of the investigation: In January, aviation officials ruled that two objects recovered from Malaysia's east coast were not from the missing airliner.

One of them, a six-foot-long metal item found in the eastern state of Terengganu, was examined by officials from the transport ministry, the Department of Civil Aviation and Malaysia Airlines.

However, the sonar search operation has turned up a 19th-century shipwreck.

Almost three-quarters of internationally-agreed 46,000 square mile search zone has been covered so far in the hunt for the missing airliner - an area of ocean floor larger than the state of South Carolina.

The operation is due to be completed by the middle of this year. The Joint Agency Coordination Center says that if no "credible new information" about the jet's location emerges, the search will end. 

Apple says it helped in the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

In response to a question about emergency situations posed today at a House committee hearing, Apple's General Counsel said the company assisted in a search following the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

APPLE SAYS IT HAS "EMERGENCY PROCEDURES" IN PLACE

At the hearing, Rep. Cedric Richmond asked Apple's Bruce Sewell how the company might handle a hypothetical - say, if clues to a forthcoming nuclear explosion were locked in an iPhone. In Sewell's response, at about 3:31:15 in the embedded video, he said Apple would attempt to find "all of the data that surrounds that phone." Sewell gestured toward other times Apple had cooperated in emergencies, including looking for a lost child and assisting the FBI after the Malaysia Airlines plane went missing in 2014.

"When the Malaysia Airline[s] plane went down, within one hour of that plane being declared missing, we had Apple operators cooperating with telephone providers all over the world, with the airlines [and] with the FBI to try to find a ping, to try to find some way we could locate where that plane was," Sewell said at the hearing. He continued, saying that Apple would use all "emergency procedures" it has available to help in the situation posed by Richmond.

An Apple spokesperson declined to elaborate on Sewell's comments.

Sewell was questioned - and occasionally grilled - during the hearing over Apple's stance on encryption. The company continues to fight with the FBI in a legal dispute over helping to crack the security on an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters.