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A piece of debris that appears to be part of a wing or wing flap has washed up on shore on a remote island in the western Indian Ocean, and investigators are racing to the area to see if it could be part of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
The flight disappeared in March of 2014 without a trace. It originally was scheduled from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, made an abrupt U-turn, and hasn't been heard from since.
Officials believe it crashed into the ocean but not a single piece of debris has been found.
Until today, perhaps.
The debris was found off Reunion Island, a French territory 380 miles from the coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. But Reunion Island is almost 4,000 miles from Malaysia and more than 3,000 miles from where an Australian-led search team had been looking for the wreckage.
That said, it's not impossible that debris could travel that far in the space of 16 months. In 2011 debris from s tsunami in Japan washed up on the shores of the west coast of the United State nine months later - a distance of nearly 5,000 miles.
Jon Ostrower, the aerospace writer for The Wall Street Journal, noted that the piece of debris looked more like a flap and not a wing. MH370 was a Boeing 777; it has not been determined yet if the debris is from that particular model plane.
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