U.S. official: Debris in photo belongs to missing jet

WASHINGTON -- Air safety investigators have a "high degree of confidence" a photo of aircraft debris found in the Indian Ocean is of a wing component unique to the Boeing 777, the same model as the Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared last year, a U.S. official said Wednesday.

Air safety investigators -- one of them a Boeing investigator -- have identified the component as a "flaperon" from the trailing edge of a 777 wing, the U.S. official said.

A French official close to an investigation of the debris confirmed Wednesday that French law enforcement is on site to examine a piece of airplane wing found on the French island of Reunion, in the western Indian Ocean. A French television network was airing video of the debris from its Reunion affiliate.

The U.S. and French officials spoke on condition they not be named because they aren't authorized to speak publicly.

At the United Nations, Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said he has sent a team to verify from where the plane wreckage came.

"Whatever wreckage found needs to be further verified before we can ever confirm that it is belonged to MH370," he said.

If the debris turns out to be from Malaysia Airlines flight 370, it will be the first major break in the effort to discover what happened to the plane after it vanished March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board while traveling from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to Beijing. A multinational search effort of the South Indian Ocean, the China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand came up dry.

A comprehensive report earlier this year into the plane's disappearance revealed the battery of the locator beacon for the plane's flight data recorder had expired more than a year before the jet vanished. The report said the battery in the locator beacon of the cockpit voice recorder, however, was working.

Investigators hope if they can locate the two recorders, they can get to the bottom of what has become one of aviation's biggest mysteries. The unsuccessful search for Flight 370 has raised concern about whether airliners should be required to transmit their locations continually via satellite, especially when flying long distances over the ocean.

Apart from the anomaly of the expired battery, the report devoted page after page to describing a flight that started normally.

The 584-page report by a 19-member independent investigation group went into minute detail about the crew's lives, including their medical and financial records and training. It also detailed the aircraft's service record, as well as the weather, communications systems and other aspects of the flight. Nothing unusual was revealed.

The 777, first introduced into service in 1995, had had an enviable safety record up until Flight 370. The only prior fatal crash was of an Asiana Airlines flight while landing in San Francisco in 2013 the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board later attributed to mistakes by the flight's pilots. Two passengers were killed in the crash, and a third was run over by a truck.

Four months after the disappearance of Flight 370, another Malaysia Airlines 777 was shot down over a rebel-held portion of Eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 aboard.