An object that could be debris from a Boeing 777 has been found off Mozambique and is being examined by investigators searching for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, sources told NBC News.
Early photographic analysis of the object suggests it could have come from the doomed jet, which vanished almost exactly 2 years ago.
It was found on a sandbank in the Mozambique Channel — the body of water between Mozambique in eastern Africa and Madagascar — and in the same corner of the southern Indian Ocean where the only confirmed piece of debris, a flaperon, was found last July.
Investigators in Malaysia, Australia and the U.S. have seen photographs of the latest object and sources say there is a good chance it comes from a Boeing 777.
The object has the words "NO STEP" on it and could be from the plane's horizontal stabilizer — the wing-like parts attached to the tail, sources say. It was discovered by an American who has been blogging about the search for MH370.
Australia's Joint Agency Coordination Center said it was aware of the discovery and arranging for a thorough examination. Malaysia Airlines said it was "too speculative at this point" to comment.
Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Laisaid on Twitter that there was a "high possibility debris found in Mozambique belongs to a" Boeing 777, but said that was "yet to be confirmed and verified."
Boeing engineers are looking at the photos, according to sources, but the company has declined to comment.
The development comes days ahead of the second anniversary of the jet's disappearance en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014 with 239 people on board.
No trace has been found of Flight MH370 except for the single barnacle-encrusted flaperon that washed up on the eastern shore of Reunion, east of Madagascar, last July. French aviation experts verified it as part of aircraft 9M-MRO after more than one month of forensic analysis at a laboratory near Toulouse.
There have been false hopes over the course of the investigation: In January, aviation officials ruled that two objects recovered from Malaysia's east coast were not from the missing airliner.
One of them, a six-foot-long metal item found in the eastern state of Terengganu, was examined by officials from the transport ministry, the Department of Civil Aviation and Malaysia Airlines.
However, the sonar search operation hasturned up a 19th-century shipwreck.
Almost three-quarters of internationally-agreed 46,000 square mile search zone has been covered so far in the hunt for the missing airliner — an area of ocean floor larger than the state of South Carolina.
The operation is due to be completed by the middle of this year. The Joint Agency Coordination Center says that if no "credible new information" about the jet's location emerges, the search will end.
(Culled from www.nbcnews.com)
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