How would one go about verifying that the debris comes from the missing plane, assuming plane-specific serial number is not found?
Any expert care to shed some light on this?
There have been 5 777 hull loss instances (all since 2008) Two crashed just before the runway (Heathrow and San Francisco) one was destroyed by fire while sitting at the gate (Cairo) one was shot down over Ukraine and one disappeared somewhere over the Indian ocean.
But that's very very farfetched.
Container ships lose something like 10000 containers at sea annually. Some of those break open and spill their contents. I'd guess that most major airlines stock repair parts in their maintenance centers, and so such parts are shipped across the oceans, and so could get lost at sea.
If, say, Air New Zealand ordered some 777 flaperons to stock their maintenance center, and those got lost in the Indian Ocean, would Air New Zealand just file an insurance claim and order more flaperons from Boeing, and everyone would generally forget about the lost flaperons drifting about in the area?
Or is there some registry or database or some such that tracks these things so that people looking for lost aircraft can check it and find what kind of lost parts they need to be careful to watch out for so that those parts won't mislead their search?
Something as large as a flaperon would definitely have a part number (which would tell you if it was part of a larger assembly), and might be serialized and directly trackable.
Disclosure: I don't work on commercial aircraft, but I do work on military aircraft.