Flaperon washes up on Reunion Island

[andrasz]

Now that we know the flaperon is from MH370, the information gained on how it became detached (and I'm sure that can be established with a fair degree on certainty) may be sufficient for a full closure of the investigation.

We already knew that the only explanation fitting the known facts was a willful human intervention to set course for the South IO. One can reasonably assume that the person doing this did it with the intention of making the plane 'disappear', the only flaw in the cunning plan being the ignorance of the Inmarsat handshakes protocol. The location of the flaperon recovery essentially confirms that the flight ended in the general area derived from Inmarsat data.

While not providing any clues to motive, the flaperon can confirm either:
A - the airplane disintegrated in a high energy state, either in the air or hitting the water, suggesting an uncontrolled descent
B - the airplane reached the water in a low energy state that could only have happened through human intervention - ie. someone at the controls.

The above is exactly what the recovery of the FDR/CVR could reveal in the best case. Most likely whoever did this had also thought of pulling the CB-s for the recorders (cf. SilkAir), but assuming they continued to the end:

In case A - the CVR will have overwritten anything that happened at the time of diversion from original flight plan, and will most likely contain 2 hours of absolutely nothing. The FDR will record that the flight progressed by A/P until fuel exhaustion, and will also record the behaviour of the plane as it made the uncontrolled descent. While this will be interesting to some, it will not provide any real answers to the why.

In case B -the CVR will record sounds of someone in the cockpit, from the FDR we will know precisely what he did to ditch (or attempt to ditch) the glider, but again no answer to the why.

Of course in either case the FDR can provide information on the sequence of actions taken at the time of diversion, and provide a precise course, but again that is not very much more, just a bit more precise than what we already know.

In Case A the information that may be expected from recovered recorders is not much more than what can be gained by analyzing the flaperon. Should this be established, it will be interesting to see how the investigation progresses.