Plane debris arrives in France for testing

Journalists watch as a white van, transporting debris that washed up on an Indian Ocean island and is believed to be part of a Boeing 777, arrives at a military testing facility in Balma, France.
Journalists watch as a white van, transporting debris that washed up on an Indian Ocean island and is believed to be part of a Boeing 777, arrives at a military testing facility in Balma, France.

BALMA, France -- A wing flap suspected to be from a Boeing 777, the same model as the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, on Saturday arrived 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 van 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 of Reunion comes from the Boeing 777 that disappeared March 8, 2014, while en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people on board.

Investigators, including a legal expert, will start their inquiry Wednesday, according to the Paris prosecutor's office. On 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. The official wasn't authorized to be publicly identified.

Flight 370 is the only missing 777, and many are convinced the flap is from the 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]," said aviation security expert Christophe Naudin on France's BFM-TV.

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

"One is in the United States, one in Ukraine, and this one in the Indian Ocean," he said.

Under a microscope and expert eyes, the wing fragment that washed up on the beach of the volcanic island could yield clues not just to its path through the Indian Ocean, but also to what happened to the airplane.

Analysts at the French aviation laboratory hope to glean details from metal stress to see what caused the flap to break off, spot explosive or other chemical traces, and study the sea life that made its home on the wing to pinpoint where it's been.

Even if the piece is confirmed to be wreckage from Flight 370, there's no guarantee that investigators can find the plane's black box recorders or other debris. A multinational search effort has so far come up empty.

Meanwhile, journalists arriving last week in Reunion to report on the discovery were met with the eruption of one of the Earth's most active volcanoes.

The Piton de la Fournaise volcano -- French for Peak of the Furnace -- is more than 530,000 years old and is one of the world's most active, with more than 150 eruptions recorded since the 1600s. It ranks with active volcanoes in Hawaii, Italy and Antarctica.

This is the third eruption this year for the volcano. The earlier ones happened in February and May.

"This is a long eruptive fissure because at the surface it is about [0.62 mile] long," said Aline Peltier, a scientist at the Piton de la Fournaise Volcano Observatory. "After 24 hours we still have five eruption sites. Usually after a day we only have one. So this is very interesting."

The lava fountains are shooting as high as 44 yards and are creating cones that are about 22 yards high after only one day of eruption, Peltier said. The volcano is in Reunion National Park -- a world heritage site.

The volcano is not seen as dangerous because the lava flows down the east side of the mountain through an uninhabited area called the Grand Brule, or the Big Burned, toward the sea. The most recent times the volcano threatened the population were in 1977 and 1986.

"It is a spectacular sight. The molten lava shoots up into the air like a fountain," said Yannick Parrel, 30, a helicopter pilot who flies tourists over Reunion's landscape.

Information for this article was contributed by Andrew Meldrum of The Associated Press.

A Section on 08/02/2015

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