Hacker News Reader

This forum thread is worth watching as well. Mostly pilots on the forum:

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re...

While there are some professional pilots on airliners.net, that forum is also frequented by many ... how can I put this politely ... armchair pilots. Best to take the discussion with a grain of salt.

In general, airline parts come with serial numbers and other means of identification. It's best to wait a day or two until the origin of the part is ascertained.

True, though there's often worse to be found from the professional journalists on the various three letter news networks.

Yeah, there's a reason they're called a.nutters.

These images were posted in the above thread purportedly from 777 maintenance manuals. The diagrams bear a very good resemblance to the photos thus far:

http://i.imgur.com/OAw6AOc.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Ti09xEh.jpg

We can't rule out confirmation bias until we're sure that no other aircraft model has a similar-looking part. Boeing could have used similar designs in several different models.

On the other hand, it's pretty rare for large aircraft (or large parts thereof) to go missing, so there aren't a whole lot of places from which this piece of wing could have come.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com