Réunion Island
La Réunion Island and Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370
Note: The island known as Réunion is officially the Department of Réunion, a French overseas region.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was a scheduled international flight which left Kuala Lumpur on Saturday, 8 March 2014 at 00:42 am (MYT) and was expected to arrive in Beijing at 6:30 am (MYT).
For reasons that are still not known, the aircraft made a turn-back west across the Malay Peninsula; changed direction again and flew north west towards the Andaman Sea; and then turned south.
Flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean about 2000 km from Perth , Western Australia.
An international search for the Boeing 777 in the southern Indian Ocean did not locate any debris from MH370 and underwater searches have failed to locate any wreckage of the Boeing 777-200ER.
However, currents in the Indian Ocean carried debris from flight MH370 thousands of kilometers counter-clockwise around the Indian Ocean in an oceanic system called a gyre. Debris which has been confirmed to be from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has been recovered in Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, La Réunion Island, South Africa and Tanzania.
The most significant item is a Flaperon which was found on La Reunion Island on 29 July 2015.
As noted above, Réunion Island is an overseas region of France. The flaperon was removed to France for analysis.
Further detail is provided below:-
|
Right Flaperon |
Saint-Denis, Réunion Island |
Adapted from Table 1.12A - Items of Debris
Source:
Safety Investigation Report MH370/01/2018
1.12 Wreckage and Impact Information
Indian Ocean Gyre
Réunion Island is a long way from the area of the southern Indian Ocean where flight MH370 ended.
Floating debris from the crash site caught by the West Australian Current would have travelled north towards the equator and west as this current feeds into the South Equatorial Current and south west towards Madagascar.
This system of ocean currents circulates anti-clockwise like a giant whirlpool, called a Gyre.
Indian Ocean Gyre
Source: Wikimedia Commons
WMC-IMG-082
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