Even if the aircraft wreckage found on Reunion Island proves to be from MH370 and can lead searchers quickly to the fuselage and black boxes, time has almost run out for a legal claim against the airline, a leading aviation lawyer says.
Jerry Skinner, from Sydney law firm LHD Lawyers, already acting for Australian victims aboard MH17, another Malaysia Airlines' aircraft, shot down over the Ukraine, says that under the Montreal Convention the opportunity to serve compensation claims "are extinguished" two years from the date of the crash.
On Sunday, August 2, it is already one year, four months and 25 days, or 512 days, since Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, with 239 people on board, disappeared from radar screens in one of the world's most baffling aviation mysteries.
A team from aircraft maker Boeing has been dispatched to France to confirm that barnacle-encrusted debris is from the plane that disappeared in March last year.
Sources close to Boeing have been quoted in the United States as saying the company believes the two-metre-long wing part known as a flaperon is from MH370, but company experts will confirm it when they arrive at the offices of France's crash investigation agency laboratory in Toulouse over the weekend.
The debris washed up on the French island of Reunion, east of Madagascar, last Wednesday.
Malaysian Airlines has been accused of using delay tactics in the case of MH17 claims, even when a family member has lost someone who provided the main income.
"The Montreal Convention is very specific," Mr Skinner said. "The cause of action that they [relatives] bring has to be brought either within two years of the day of travel or the date the aircraft should have arrived at its destination. In this case, they would have been the same day."
An initial "tier one" payment of about $113,000 has no relationship to what happened to the flight, Mr Skinner said. But with second tier claims for damages for families, claiming for lost ones who had large incomes, there is a need to know what the facts are.
"If you don't find black boxes or find the aeroplane until the week before, it would be difficult to prove your tier one damages by the cut-off point and then have the right to file for full damages. Without the facts, a suit for full damages would be very difficult."
It was conceivable, he said, that people will simply not act until the last minute, believing that Malaysia Airlines will take care of them. "They [claimants] wait and they wait, and suddenly there isn't anyone who will take those claims because they don't have time to put together the appropriate evidentiary standard."
He also said that the flaperon didn't appear to show any impact damage from hitting the ocean, which seemed to indicate that there was some kind of in-flight break up.
"The wing tips are among pieces that tend to come off before an aircraft hits water in a rapid descent at supersonic speed.They come down a lot slower, floating down almost like a feather. It would be carried on the surface [because of its honeycomb structure] rather than going beneath the water with the vast majority of the aircraft.
"It could have been moved by currents and wind, two steps forward, one step back. That could explain why it took a year-and-a-half to come to shore.
"What that means here is that, for one reason or another, this aircraft was in a dive, whether it was deliberate or not. Coming down fast enough that parts of the plane were separating and that is never intended to happen. That does seem to indicate some deliberation."
