Search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 to Continue Off Australia

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/07/world/asia/mh370-australia-debris-search.html

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SYDNEY, Australia — The search for a missing Malaysian jet in waters off Australia’s western coast will continue as planned, Australia’s prime minister said on Thursday, hours after his Malaysian counterpart announced that a wing part found thousands of miles away was the first confirmed debris from the Boeing 777.

Tony Abbott, the Australian leader, said the fact that a piece of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 had turned up on Réunion, a French island near Madagascar, fit investigators’ theory that the plane had crashed in the area where his country has been leading a seabed search. Experts have said that ocean currents could have carried debris to Réunion from that area.

“What we have found in the western Indian Ocean does seem to indicate the plane did come down more or less where we thought it did,” Mr. Abbott told reporters in Geelong, Australia. “And it suggests that for the first time we might be a little bit closer to solving this baffling mystery.”

Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak, said early Thursday morning that the object found last week on Réunion — which experts said was a wing part called a flaperon — had been “conclusively confirmed” to be from Flight 370, which disappeared on March 8, 2014, with 239 people aboard.

Officials in France, where the part is being examined, were somewhat less definitive at a news conference in Paris, with one saying there were “very strong presumptions” that it was from the Malaysian jet.

While Australia leads the undersea search for the plane, Malaysia is conducting the broader investigation into its disappearance, which remains a mystery. Flight 370 stopped communicating with ground controllers not long after leaving Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, for Beijing.

According to radar data and satellite signals, it veered off course less than an hour into the flight, heading west across the Malay Peninsula and then flying south for several hours. Investigators believe it ran out of fuel and crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.

Mr. Abbott said the search of ocean floor in that area, which after 10 months has yet to turn up any debris from the plane, would continue. “We owe it to the hundreds of millions of people who use our skies,” he said.

David Griffin, an Australian scientist who has mapped ocean currents in the area, said on Thursday that he believed more debris from Flight 370 could wash up on Madagascar, the much larger island to the west of Réunion.

“There could be a very large amount of debris floating, or a very small amount,” said Mr. Griffin, who is with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia. “I am slightly surprised that something turned up at Réunion, rather than Madagascar, because Madagascar is so much bigger.”