PUTRAJAYA, March 23 – A piece of debris, possibily from the ‘Inlet Cowling’ of an aircraft engine was discovered along the southern coast of South Africa, near the town of Mosselbay yesterday. Transport Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai said further examination and analysis were required to verify if the debris belonged to the missing Malaysian Airlines (MAS) Flight MH370.
“The ministry and Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) were in close contact with the South African Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) on the matter. A team will be despatched to retrieve the debris. The ministry would provide updates “as and when” new information became available,” he said in a statement Tuesday.
The Boeing 777 jetliner with 239 people on board vanished from the radar during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. Currently, search efforts are conducted in the southern Indian Ocean where Flight MH370’s final flight path was believed to have ended. Early this month, two pieces of debris were discovered in Mozambique and the examination process was scheduled to start on Monday in Australia.
The MH370 Safety Investigation Team assisted in the examination and analysis of the debris by experts from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), Department of Civil Aviation Malaysia (DCA), Malaysia Airlines and Boeing to verify their origins. The only piece of MH370 debris recovered so far, was a fragment of a wing that washed up on a beach off France’s Reunion Island in July last year.
