MH370 search: Wing debris confirmed as part of Boeing 777

A wing flap that washed up on the beach of an Indian Ocean island has been verified by French authorities and others, including Boeing, as being from a Boeing 777, Malaysia Airlines said on Sunday.

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The airline's Flight 370, which disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board in March 2014, is the only missing 777.

Malaysia says it's seeking help from territories near the French island of Réunion where the wing flap was found last Wednesday in order to expand the search area for plane debris.

News of an expanded search came as a second piece of debris was found on the island's shoreline and photographed.

2nd object not aircraft part

Media reports had said the object could be the door of an aircraft and that it was discovered near the city of St Denis, 20 kilometres from where the wing flap was discovered. However, a Malaysian official was later quoted by The Associated Press as saying it was nothing more than a "domestic ladder."

Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said in a statement Sunday that the Department of Civil Aviation is reaching out to these authorities to allow experts "to conduct more substantive analysis should there be more debris coming on to land, providing us more clues to the missing aircraft."

The two-metre-long wing flap, or flaperon, arrived in France on Saturday and taken to a laboratory just east of Toulouse for examination.

Under a microscope and expert eyes, the fragment could yield clues not just to the missing aircraft's path through the Indian Ocean, but also to what happened to the plane.

Analysts at the French aviation laboratory hope to glean details from metal stress to see what caused the flap to break off, spot explosive or other chemical traces, and study the sea life that made its home on the wing to pinpoint where it came from.

French investigators are not expected to begin examining the wreckage before Wednesday afternoon and their Malaysian counterparts will also be present, the Paris prosecutor's office said in a statement.

Investigators believe someone deliberately switched off MH370's transponder before diverting it thousands of kilometres off course. Most of the passengers were Chinese.

The debris will be analyzed at a lab staffed by 600 experts and operated by the French defence ministry.