Photo taken on Jul.29, 2015, shows a piece of debris on Reunion Island. Verification had confirmed that the debris discovered on Reunion Island belongs to missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced early Thursday. (Xinhua/Romain Latournerie)
As Malaysian authorities officially confirmed Thursday that the debris found on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion belongs to the missing flight MH370, mysteries surrounding the ill-fated plane remain.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said early Thursday that experts examining the debris had "conclusively confirmed" it was from flight MH370.
Najib's statement was later echoed by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who said Thursday's finding confirmed that the Australian-led search efforts were conducted in the correct area.
Contrary to those categorical announcements by government officials, investigators of the French-led team in Toulouse have avoided being too assertive.
French prosecutor Serge Mackowiak said initial tests showed there were "very strong indications" that the wing fragment known as a flaperon was from flight MH370. But he said confirmation would only come after further tests on the fragment are made.
"[Investigators] will try to do it as soon as possible in order to provide total and reliable information to the families of victims, who are on our minds at the moment," he was quoted by the BBC as saying.
Even if Mackowiak's words can be regarded as a mere practice of supreme legal caution that doesn't imply any doubt whatsoever about Najib's firm conclusion, issues surrounding this air tragedy -- one of the most mysterious of its kind in the aviation history -- remain unsolved.
The first issue is the exact location where the plane had crashed. The search team, now led by Australia and once joined by 25 countries, have long believed that the plane had crashed into the southern Indian Ocean despite a lack of evidence from a massive search operation.
Although the confirmation that the newly found debris belongs to MH370 "does seem very consistent", as Abbott said, ocean experts in Australia said that with the search pattern Australia has been using, identifying the wing offered little help to finding the rest of the plane's wreckage.
"It's not only the currents, it's the winds, the waves and depending on the size of the debris, whether it's above the water or below," Greg Bamber, an ocean expert at Australia's Monash University, said referring to the "large and unexplored" Indian ocean. He added that it's more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack.
In addition, investigators and the aviation industry are still left puzzled as to what caused the plane crash, as its black box recorder, whose battery has already expired, remains undiscovered.
The Australian search team had once narrowed its search area in April, 2014, according to detected signals believed to be from the doomed fight's black box, but produced no results.
A third question that remains unanswered is what caused the plane to divert its original route -- from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing -- so profoundly and inexplicably.
Najib told the public one week after the flight's disappearance that the cause was deliberate, but Malaysian Airlines later ruled out the possibility of a pre-planned hijack attempt. Background checks on all Chinese passengers on board also found no links of sabotage or terrorism.
With all the above being said, current progress concerning flight MH370 should only mark the beginning of a reinvigorated search for other parts of the crashed plane and facilitate continued investigation into the tragedy.
