(Aug 6): Australian authorities said they were confident the search for MH370 was being carried out in the right area and the plane would be found after Malaysia confirmed debris on an Indian Ocean island was from the missing flight.

"(The La Reunion find) is consistent with all the work we've done so we're confident that we're looking in the right area and we'll find the aircraft there," Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, told ABC radio.

But Dolan added that it was "too early to tell" what happened to the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet which disappeared 17 months ago, adding that "close examination (of the flaperon) is what's necessary to access how much we can learn".

Australia has been leading the hunt for the plane which vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board in March last year.

Satellite and other data point to it coming down in the southern Indian Ocean and ships have been scouring more than 50,000 sq km of deep ocean floor for evidence.

Authorities plan to search a total of 120,000 sq km.

No evidence had been found until the wing part washed up on the French territory of La Reunion, which Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said early today was from the jet.

French prosecutors used more cautious language, saying only that there was a "very high probability" the wreckage came from MH370.

Australia on Wednesday said its drift modelling showed debris could have been carried by wind and currents to La Reunion, some 4,000 km from the region where MH370 was thought to have gone down.

"Implications are that the arrival of this flaperon in La Reunion is consistent with the search area which was specified based on satellite information," Dolan added Thursday.

"We'll continue our search in that area that we'd previously specified.

"We have two vessels operating still out in the Indian Ocean with towed sonar and they will cover the sea... thoroughly in the specified search area. We hope as the weather improves to put more assets onto the search." – AFP