This post has been updated.
The fragment of an airplane wing recently washed up on the French island of La Réunion, approximately 600 miles (950 km) east of Madagascar. An anonymous US official confirmed to the Associated Press that investigators have “a high degree of confidence” the wing is from a Boeing 777, the same type of plane as the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared en route from Indonesia to China in March 2014.
The man who discovered the wreckage reportedly contacted Xavier Tytelman, a former French military pilot and aviation security consultant. Tytelman also said the debris looks like it came from a Boeing 777.
The discovery of the airplane wing is sue to reawaken interest in the mystery of what happened to MH370. The search for the plane cost tens of millions of dollars and uncovered tons of garbage in the sea, but led to no tangible answers for the accident investigators and grieving families of the 239 people who were on board.
La Réunion is some 4,000 miles away from where MH370 was last seen, and is also far away from the zone in the southern Indian Ocean where search efforts were concentrated last year. But theories about which way MH370 actually flew continue to proliferate.