Search for MH370 closer to success: Australia

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott says he is confident that the search for Malaysian Flight MH370 is being carried out in almost the right area and efforts to find it are closer to success.

His statement came just hours after Malaysia confirmed on Thursday that the debris recently found on an Indian Ocean island was from the missing flight.

The debris, part of a wing known as a flaperon, was found last week on Reunion Island located in the Indian Ocean.

The debris “does seem to indicate that the plane did come down, more or less where we thought it did, and it suggests that for the first time we might be a little bit closer to solving this baffling mystery,” Prime Minister Abbott told reporters on Thursday.

Meanwhile, Martin Dolan, the chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), the agency leading the search in the remote Indian Ocean far off the west coast of the island continent, said that “We’re confident that we’re looking in the right area and we’ll find the aircraft there.”

Dolan, however, told a local radio that it was “too early to tell” what happened to the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet and that “close examination (of the debris) is what’s necessary to access how much we can learn.”

Australia has been leading the search for the plane, which vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board in March last year.

Earlier, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak confirmed that part of the aircraft wing found on Reunion Island is from the missing Flight MH370 plane.

Najib said experts examining the debris in France had “conclusively confirmed” it was from the aircraft.

Meanwhile in China, many families of the passengers who had been on board the Flight MH370 struggled to accept Najib’s announcement.

“It’s not the end,” said Jacquita Gonzales, who lost her husband Patrick Gomes, a flight attendant on board the aircraft. “Although they found something, you know, it’s not the end. They still need to find the whole plane and our spouses as well. We still want them back,” she said.

The plane, a Boeing 777, was minutes into its scheduled flight when it disappeared from civil radar 18 months ago.

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