KUALA LUMPUR, July 30 ― A serial number found on the debris discovered on Réunion Island will allow authorities to determine whether the aircraft part belongs to missing Malaysia Airlines (MAS) Flight MH370, aviation experts have said.

The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) quoted former US National Transport Safety Bureau investigator Greg Feith as saying that all manufacturers put data tags on every part that goes on an aircraft, apart from things such as screws.

“If that data plate is there, it's relatively easy [to match it with the type of plane it's from],” SMH quoted Feith from an interview with news site Wired.

Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau who had been tasked with co-ordinating MH370 the search off the coast of Western Australia, was quoted by SMH saying that the serial number could link the part definitively within the next 24 hours as to whether it was part of the jetliner that disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014.

The Australian paper also quoted a French official with knowledge of the investigation on the Reunion Island debris as saying that the object appeared to be a wing flap, possibly from a Boeing 777.

The official added that the object was about 9 feet (2.7 metres) long and 3 feet (one metre) wide, and that it appeared to have been in the water for a very long time.

But a French aviation security expert has said that the debris that washed up on the Réunion Island likely belongs to a light twin-engine plane instead of a Boeing 777 jumbo jetliner.

Amid hope that the flaperon could be from missing Malaysia Airlines (MAS) Flight MH370, Christophe Naudin said it might instead be linked to a previous crash involving a Piper plane in 2006.

Naudin also pointed out that the string “BB670” found on the wreckage also did not match any aviation registration.

“Registrations have extremely familiar forms and are codified by one of the annexes of the International Organization of Civil Aviation and this does not correspond at all to this, unless it was a military plane, but it's too small for it to be the case,” added Naudin.

Transport Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai said yesterday Malaysia has sent a team to Réunion Island off the east coast of Africa to determine whether washed-up debris may be from the missing MH370 that is believed to have crashed in the Indian Ocean last year.

Eric Chesneau, an officer in the air transport police of the French Indian Ocean territory Réunion, told news agency Reuters that it was “more than likely plane debris” that had washed up, but further inspection was needed.

The Australian government, however, said that if the debris was really from MH370, the finding would be “consistent” with analysis and modeling of the missing plane’s trajectory.

Flight MH370 went missing with 239 people on board while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8 last year.