Destroying a Fantasy

"It's the first real evidence that there is a possibility that a part of the aircraft may have been found. It's too early to make that judgement [that it is indeed part of the missing plane] but clearly we are treating this as a major lead."
Australian Transport Minister Warren Truss

"It has been more than one year, and now they claim to have found debris of MH370 on an island? We don't accept this. We do not believe what they claim."
"The finding does not constitute anything."
Dal Shuqin, sister of of downed plane victim

French gendarmes and police inspect a large piece of plane debris which was found on the beach in Saint-Andre, on the French Indian Ocean island of La Reunion, July 29, 2015.  Reuters/Zinfos974/Prisca Bigot

The devastating loss of 239 people who travelled aboard Flight 370 on March 8, 2014 which disappeared mysteriously when it lost contact with air traffic control and failed to respond to anxious calls, then seemingly veered off its flight path, has left grieving family members still insisting on the belief that the plane had landed somewhere, and eventually all the passengers and crew will be found, alive.

News that a piece of detritus from a Boeing 777 has washed ashore on the French island of Reunion in the western Indian Ocean is no reassurance to these family members, but a threat that reality will impinge on their dreams of being reunited with their loved ones. That a wing flap has shown up on Reunion and that Flight 370 is the only missing Boeing 777 must seem a cruel irony.

The mystery of what happened and how it happened may not be advanced by discovery of the wing part, however, even if French investigators feel there is a possibility that some data may be gleaned from the wing part as to whether an explosion had occurred. The plane part travelled on ocean currents so far from where the plane is assumed to have gone down that it is unlikely searchers will be led to that area where the plane disappeared.

A marine geologist at Australia's James Cook University has explained that large objects travelling vast distances across the Indian Ocean do not represent a rare anomaly. When a man lost his vessel off the Western Australia coast in rough seas last year it turned up eight months later off the French island of Mayotte, west of Madagascar, some 7,400 kilometres from its point of disappearance.

Investigators believe that satellite data point to the plane turning south into the Indian Ocean once it vanished from radar. An alternate theory holds that the plane travelled north, or landed somewhere after being hijacked, and it is this latter belief that keeps bereaved family members hoping that their lost ones will eventually show up.

They have no wish understandably, for investigators to conclude after closely examining the wing flaperon that damage points to the plane breaking up in the air, or doing so as it hit the ocean and how violently it hit. The hope they hold so fondly will be destroyed and they will be further devastated.