The head of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau says the 90cm piece of debris found on a sandbank in Mozambique and believed to belong to a missing Malaysia Airlines plane should arrive in Canberra early next week.
Chief commissioner Martin Dolan, who is heading up the search for flight MH370 off Australia's west coast, says the part is being brought to Australia rather than Malaysia because the ATSB has facilities set up for examining aircraft wreckage and trained technical staff on hand to help.
The part will be analysed by multiple people, including ATSB materials failure experts, with Boeing representatives and the Malaysian investigation team giving advice.
Investigators hope that once the part arrives at the ATSB laboratories in Canberra, they will be able to confirm whether or not the piece is from flight MH370 within a matter of days, Dolan said on Friday.
"All that we know is that it's a piece from an aircraft. It's sufficiently similar to a part from a large passenger aircraft, possibly a 777, for us to want to take a close look at it," Dolan told the AP.
"At this stage, we have no conclusive evidence as to what it is or where it comes from."
Even if confirmed to be from flight 370, Dolan said it was too early to speculate on whether the part could shed any light on what happened to the aircraft, including whether it could clarify if someone was at the controls when the plane hit the water.
The search team has been operating on the theory that no one was steering the plane when it crashed, but some critics have argued there may have been someone controlling the plane at the end of its flight.
If that was the case, the plane could have glided much further than investigators believe, thus tripling in size the search area.
"That's the sort of thing we'll have to do a very close analysis of this part (to find out), if indeed it is associated with MH370," Dolan said.
"The question we will have to establish to the best of our ability is what level of energy was involved in the aircraft colliding with the water to have led to the separation of the part."
The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 disappeared on March 8, 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, killing 239 people, including six Australians. It's believed it crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia, about 6000 kilometres east of Mozambique.
The seas have so far yielded just one other piece of evidence - a wing fragment - which was discovered last July on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion.
Authorities have long predicted that any debris from the plane that isn't on the ocean floor would eventually be carried by currents to the east coast of Africa.
