I've never encountered floating aircraft parts, but was on a ship in the eastern Gulf of Mexico that ran across floating wreckage of a nautical nature.
Conveniently, it had distinctive numbers and other markings, and a little web research identified it as one hull of a racing catamaran that broke up in a storm 15 months before in mid-Atlantic.
Now, the current where we found it floating was easterly - FROM the Gulf INTO the Atlantic (by way of the Straits of Florida - the famous Gulf Stream).
So anyone attempting a simplistic analyisis with an ocean currents chart and a ruler would have "proved" that it could not possibly have been where it was - except that, in
FACT, that is where it ended up.
A more sophisticated analysis (and consistent with the observed facts) might have been that it drifted south into the Equatorial Current (or even east into the Canary Current and thus to the EC), and then west into the Caribbean Current and through the Yucatan Channel to where we found it.
Although even that would be guesswork, and oversimplified. The paths of floating objects in the sea, while they may have a slight bias in one direction or another over time, are essentially "random walks" as the object is influenced by both wind and water, and bounces around from one flow to the next.
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/graphi..._ind_aug97.gif