Malaysia Confirms Debris Comes From Missing Airliner

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced on Thursday morning local time that an airplane fragment found late last month was debris from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which has been the subject of a broad international search since disappearing in March 2014.

The Boeing 777 was traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people from 14 countries onboard when it went down. A grueling ordeal ensued for the families of passengers and crew as multinational searchers combed the oceans by air and boat, from the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea to the Strait of Malacca and the Andaman Sea, looking for some trace of the airliner. They found nothing. Before last week’s discovery and Thursday’s confirmation, no one had seen a shred of physical evidence connected to the disaster.

The debris — a wing fragment known as a “flaperon” — was found some 3,800 miles from the point where the plane lost contact. “Today, 515 days since the plane disappeared, it is with a very heavy heart that I must tell you that an international team of experts has conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris found on Reunion Island is indeed from MH370,” Najib said at the early morning press conference.

French aviation safety officials, who took custody of the debris because it was found on French territory, said they were studying the fragment for evidence that could help solve the mystery of the disappearance, which held the world’s attention for weeks.

Cable news channels were drawn to the story like iron filings to a magnet, hashing over with endless abandon what scant information they had. In one particularly glaring example, CNN anchor Don Lemon asked if it was “preposterous” to wonder whether the plane had disappeared into a black hole. One of his guests, former Transportation Department official Mary Schiavo, responded with a memorable put-down: “A small black hole would suck in our entire universe, so we know it’s not that.” Andrew Tyndall — who runs the Tyndall Report, a television news monitoring site — compared the story from a narrative perspective to the O.J. Simpson trial, but without a verdict.

In the wake of Thursday’s announcement, CNN.com featured more than 25 links to various MH370 stories.

Photo credit: Yannick Pitou/AFP/Getty Images