AKIPRESS.COM - Months after flight MH370 mysteriously vanished, experts in France were to begin on Wednesday examining a washed-up wing part that likely belonged to the doomed plane and could provide a breakthrough in one of aviation’s greatest enigmas, The Himalayan Times reports.

The Malaysia Airlines jet disappeared on March 8 last year, inexplicably veering off course en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, sparking a colossal but ultimately fruitless multinational hunt for the aircraft.

But last week’s discovery of a two-meter-long wing part called a flaperon on the French Indian Ocean island of La Reunion raised fresh hopes for relatives desperate for answers. The Boeing 777 piece was taken to the southwestern French city of Toulouse, where it will undergo tests at a high-tech laboratory, where journalists from around the world were camped outside on Wednesday.

The case containing the wing part will be opened in the presence of French, Malaysian and Australian experts, Boeing employees and representatives from China – the country that lost the most passengers.

It is as yet unclear whether their conclusions will be announced on the same day or later.

Jean-Paul Troadec, the former head of France’s BEA agency that investigates air accidents, said the analysis would focus on two issues – whether the flaperon belongs to MH370 and if so, whether it can shed light on the plane’s final moments. He pointed for instance to the paint on the piece as a key element of the probe. “Every airline paints their planes in a certain way... and if the paint used is used by Malaysia Airlines and other companies, there may be more certainty, as other companies may not use Boeing 777s for instance,” he said.

Australia’s deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss, meanwhile, said drift modelling performed by the national science agency confirmed debris could have been carried by wind and currents to La Reunion, some 4,000 km from the region where MH370 was thought to have gone down.

Scientists have pointed to the barnacles attached to the flaperon, saying these could give an idea of how long the piece has been in the water, and perhaps where it has been.

“If it has cold-water barnacles on it that might tell them it went down further south than they think. Or if it’s got only tropical barnacles, that might tell them it went down further north,” said Shane Ahyong, a crustacean specialist from the Australian Museum. But he said some oceanic barnacles were so widespread that pinpointing their precise origin would likely be impossible given the lack of genetic and population information about them.