UPDATE-The Now Not So Strange Saga of the MH370 Plane Part
Just when you think this will not get any more weird…
The update 9/2/2015
(CNN)Now even French investigators are convinced: The airplane debris found on Reunion Island in July belonged to vanished Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a top French prosecutor said Thursday.
Investigators learned Thursday that a series of numbers found inside the plane flaperon matches with records, held by a Spanish company that manufactured portions of the component, linking the debris to MH370, the office of Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins said.
Tomorrow marks one month since a piece of a Boeing 777 washed up on the Indian Ocean island of La R�union, but French investigators are no closer to confirming that the part came from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. In fact, leaks from within the investigation suggest that the part might not have come from the plane at all.
Such a conclusion, if confirmed, would constitute a shocking reversal. At the time of the discovery, it was generally accepted that the wing segment, a so-called “flaperon,” could only come from MH370: Boeing engineers confirmed that the part was from a 777, and MH370 was the only 777 to have gone missing. Aviation experts declared that serial numbers on the flaperon would allow it to be definitively linked to the missing plane within 24 hours. When that deadline passed, news outlets told readers that the ID should be nailed down within a few days. Then by the following week.
What was holding things up, it turned out, was that the ID plate that should have been attached to the inboard edge of the flaperon was missing. And that was not the only problem. According to the New York Times, Boeing and the National Transportation Safety Board found that the object did not match Malaysia Airlines’ maintenance records.