MH370 search: Possible wreckage could offer clues on how plane crashed

Investigators should be able to identify what plane a two-metre piece of wreckage discovered on the Indian Ocean's Réunion Island is from easily enough, aviation experts say.

But even if they confirm it belongs to missing Flight MH370, a single piece is unlikely to solve the bigger mystery of what happened to the Malaysia Airlines plane after it took off from Kuala Lumpur nearly 18 months ago.

• The Passionate Eye: Where is Flight MH370?
• What's needed to find the plane

The flight, which was travelling to Beijing, disappeared on March 8, 2014. Neither the 239 people aboard the Boeing 777 nor any wreckage have been recovered despite exhaustive international efforts that included scouring the ocean floor.

A Boeing investigator and other officials have identified the mystery object as a flaperon, part of a plane's wing, belonging to a Boeing 777, a U.S. official told Reuters. Other than MH370, no Boeing 777s are known to be missing.

Serial numbers, construction materials

Several aspects of the wreckage could help investigators link it to the missing plane.

"The bigger the piece, the more chances are that you can identify where it came from," says Hillel Glazer, the founder and CEO of Entinex, a management consulting firm with multiple clients in the aerospace field. Glazer holds an aerospace engineering degree and spent the 1990s working in the manufacturing of aerospace products.

If you can find more pieces, then you can probably get a really good sense of what happened to the aircraft.-  Paul Walsh, Ryerson University's aerospace engineering department chair

A bigger piece of wreckage means a higher chance investigators will find identification numbers, he says.

Nearly all plane parts are labelled with a serial and part number. 

A local paper on the island shared photos it claimed were of the wreckage, showing a series of numbers and letters etched on it. Warren Truss, Australia's deputy prime minister, verified that the piece had something stamped on it.

Major companies like Boeing have "incredibly extensive" inventory management systems that could easily track either of these ID numbers back to a specific plane. It could take a bit more time to track down the plane it came from if Boeing purchased the part from a supplier, he says.

French officials will ship the debris to Toulouse, France, said Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak in a blog post. The city is the closest office of the French authority responsible for safety investigations of civil aviation accidents. The piece is expected to arrive in Toulouse on Saturday.

If the piece doesn't have serial numbers, investigators could narrow down what it might be by determining what materials it's made of and what manufacturing processes it's been through, says Glazer.

The debris may also have telling marks from periodic maintenance, says Paul Walsh, Ryerson University's aerospace engineering department chair and associate professor. Thus Boeing's maintenance logs for the MH370 plane may also help to identify where the wreckage came from.

But, even if all the clues lead back to Flight MH370, Glazer says, experts will be hard pressed to learn more from the singular piece of wreckage.

"You've got a better chance of getting hit by lightning or a tornado, or, you know, landing a human on Mars next year," says Glazer.

"Unless we astronomically got the one piece that shows what happened."

Not a 'very violent impact'

While the piece may not reveal the whole story, it can still offer some insight into what happened that day, says Ryerson University's Walsh.

If it's confirmed to be MH370 wreckage, experts will likely be able to determine with how much energy the plane hit the water. But any such talk is highly speculative at this point, he says.

• Maps, background, search details
• The challenges of a remote ocean search​

Walsh, who has seen pictures of the object on the news, says the piece is "relatively intact."

This leads him to believe it was not a "very violent impact" where the plane dove straight into the ocean. In that worst-case scenario, every part would show signs of severe impact or be heavily damaged. 

Instead, it likely entered the water somewhere on the continuum between gliding in and ditching in, says Walsh.

That means there are likely more, similar pieces out there, he says, either floating or washed up somewhere in that part of the world, if not the same island.

But finding more pieces could be a daunting task. Experts would have to reverse-engineer ocean currents over the past year and a half, Greg Feith, an aviation safety consultant, told Reuters.

However, says Walsh, airplanes are made of material that doesn't corrode easily and would likely take years to deteriorate simply from being in the water. 

"If you can find more pieces, then you can probably get a really good sense of what happened to the aircraft."