BEIJING -- Investigators trying to determine what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 more than 16 months ago said Thursday that they were nearly certain that a 6-foot-long piece of a plane's wing assembly was part of a Boeing 777 -- and the Malaysia plane is the only Boeing 777 that is missing.
The "flaperon" found by beachcombers on the remote west Indian Ocean island of Reunion, a French overseas territory near Madagascar, could be seen bearing a number that air safety investigators reportedly have identified as a 777 part.
Authorities on Reunion also were examining a piece of luggage found in the same area as the wing part, although it was unclear whether the badly damaged zippered bag was related to the Malaysian aircraft that disappeared from radar screens on March 8, 2014.
Discovery of the barnacle-covered flaperon, if confirmed to have come from the Malaysian jet, could put to rest lingering speculation that the aircraft, with its 239 passengers and crew members, was hijacked rather than crashed.
"It's too early to make that judgment, but clearly we are treating this as a major lead," Warren Truss, Australia's deputy prime minister, said at a news conference Thursday in Sydney. He called the debris find a "significant development."
Truss said a number found on the plane piece, BB670, would help identify it through maintenance records and that scientists were examining photographs of barnacles on the object to estimate how long it had been in the ocean.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Thursday that the debris -- reported to be 6-8 feet long and 3 feet wide -- was being shipped by French authorities to Toulouse, site of the nearest office of the BEA, the French authority responsible for civil-aviation accident investigations.
A Malaysian team was on the way to Toulouse, and a second group from the airline was traveling to Reunion, Najib said.
"We have had many false alarms before, but for the sake of the families who have lost loved ones and suffered such heartbreaking uncertainty, I pray that we will find out the truth, so that they may have closure and peace," Najib said in the statement.
A French official with knowledge about the investigation said it may be a week or more before investigators determine whether the debris was from the missing Malaysian flight because the piece is not expected to arrive in Paris for two or three days, and the investigation in Toulouse will take another several days after that.
The disappearance of the Malaysian plane as it flew from Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur, to Beijing sparked the most extensive search operation in aviation history, involving at least a dozen countries and costing hundreds of millions of dollars. No confirmed traces of the plane have been found.
Searchers have identified the prime search area as a span of the Indian Ocean 1,100 miles off Australia's western coast. The search effort has slowed significantly in recent months because of the onset of winter in the region.
The plane likely went down so far away from Reunion that even if the wing part is confirmed to be from Flight 370, it won't necessarily help narrow the search field.
"You cannot reverse path and know with any degree of reliability where the plane is," Truss said. It crashed "too far away, and too long ago." Still, he said he hoped the finding would put to rest some of the "wild" speculation on the fate of the plane.
The debris was found by people cleaning a beach in Saint-Andre, a commune on the east coast of Reunion Island.
Five Boeing 777s have met with disaster, according to the Aviation Safety Network, an online database of flight information. Wreckage was recovered from four, with only the Malaysian flight still unaccounted for.
Antoine Forestier, a journalist on Reunion Island, said a small group of gardeners found the debris about 9 a.m. Wednesday and called police.
"Today we're waiting for investigators from Paris," he said. "We're really a very little island -- so now, it's strange for us to have all this media, to have everybody talking about us. This is very big news for us."
Malaysia Airlines urged people not to get their hopes up that the plane had been found until a definitive identification could be made on the piece of debris.
"With regards to the reports of the discovery of an aircraft flaperon at Reunion Island, Malaysia Airlines is working with the relevant authorities to confirm the matter," the airline said in a statement. "At the moment, it would be too premature for the airline to speculate the origin of the flaperon."
Information for this article was contributed by Jonathan Kaiman, Julie Makinen and staff members of the Los Angeles Times; and by Michelle Innis, Nicola Clark and staff members of The New York Times.
A Section on 07/31/2015