Aircraft vanished in 2014 with 239 people on board and five pieces have been found close to the Indian Ocean
TWO more pieces of debris discovered on beaches in South Africa and Mauritius are “almost certainly” from Flight MH370, officials have said.
This brings the total number of pieces believed to have come from the missing Malaysian jet to five.
The aircraft mysteriously vanished in March 2014 with 239 people on board, and so far a huge underwater search of the Indian Ocean off Australia’s west coast has found nothing.
Finding the debris has convinced authorities’ that the plane went down somewhere in the Indian Ocean – but none of the parts has given any clues into exactly where and why the jet crashed.
The flight data recorders, or black boxes, may never be found, expert Geoff Dell said.
He added: “It shows they’re looking in the right ocean — that’s about it.”
The two newly identified pieces were found in March.
The other is an interior panel piece from an aircraft cabin — the first interior part found from the missing plane.
An international team of experts in Australia who examined the debris concluded that both pieces were consistent with panels found on a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft.
Liow added in a statement: “As such, the team has confirmed that both pieces of debris from South Africa and Rodrigues Island are almost certainly from MH370.”
All five pieces have been found in various spots around the Indian Ocean.
Last year, a wing part from the plane washed ashore on France’s Reunion Island.
All four other pieces were found in March, including two found along Mozambique’s coast that investigators confirmed earlier to be almost certainly from the aircraft.
The jet, which vanished while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, is believed to have crashed somewhere in a remote stretch of the southern Indian Ocean about 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) off Australia’s west coast.
Authorities had predicted that any debris from the plane that isn’t on the ocean floor would eventually be carried by currents to the east coast of Africa.
Marine life attached to the debris is being investigated for clues as to where it entered the ocean, but nothing useful has been discovered yet.
The interior part, identified by its decorative laminate, is a panel from the main cabin and believed to be part of a drop-down table.
But even this will not answer whether anyone was still at the controls of the plane at the end of its flight, or whether the plane spiraled uncontrollably into the water after running out of fuel.
Dell added: “I wouldn’t hang your hat too much on what it says, other than it’s got to come out of the airplane somehow and that suggests there was a structural failure in the fuselage that allowed it to get out.
“But how, exactly — who knows?”
That part was found by tourists on Rodrigues Island, while the piece with part of a Rolls-Royce logo was found by an archaeologist while walking along South Africa’s southern coast.
Ron Bishop, head of aviation at Central Queensland University, said the debris may help the investigation by leading to more debris discoveries.
He said: “The best part about it is, it makes it where now any time anyone finds something on a beach that’s weird-looking … they’ll turn it in.
“I’m sure there’s tons of this lying on beaches — we’re just not noticing it that much.
“Not all this stuff is going to look like a wing – it’s just going to look like garbage.”
As for the underwater search, crews have combed more than 105,000 square kilometers (40,000 square miles) of the Indian Ocean to no avail.
They expect to complete their sweep of the plane’s most likely location by the end of June.
