Air safety investigators have identified this wing component found on the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean as a “flaperon” from the trailing edge of a Boeing 777 wing. Experts say it is likely debris from Flight 370, which vanished on March 8, 2014.

WASHINGTON — Air safety investigators have a “high degree of confidence” that aircraft debris found in the Indian Ocean is of a wing component unique to the Boeing 777, the same model as the Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared last year, a U.S. official said Wednesday.

Air safety investigators — one of them a Boeing investigator — have identified the component that was found on the French island of Reunion in the western Indian Ocean as a “flaperon” from the trailing edge of a 777 wing, the U.S. official said.

Given that there are no other missing 777s, if the piece is confirmed to be from such an aircraft, it would almost certainly have to belong to Flight 370, which vanished on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board while traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

A discovery of debris from the missing plane would confirm the prevailing belief based on satellite data that the plane turned south into the Indian Ocean after vanishing from radar, and put to rest other theories that it traveled north, or landed somewhere after being hijacked.

The piece itself could also help investigators figure out how the plane crashed. But whether it will help search crews pinpoint the rest of the wreckage is unclear, given the complexity of the currents in the southern Indian Ocean and the time that has elapsed since the plane disappeared.

A French official close to an investigation of the debris confirmed Wednesday that French law enforcement is on Reunion to examine a piece of airplane wing that was found. A French television network was airing video from its Reunion affiliate of the debris. U.S. investigators are examining a photo of the debris.

The U.S. and French officials spoke on condition that they not be named because they aren’t authorized to speak publicly.

If the part is from Flight 370, it would be the first debris found from the vanished airliner. A massive multinational search effort of the southern Indian Ocean, the China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand has turned up no trace of the plane.

The last primary radar contact with Flight 370 placed its position over the Andaman Sea about 230 miles northwest of the Malaysian city of Penang. Reunion is about 3,500 miles southwest of Penang, and about 2,600 miles west of the current search area.

At the United Nations, Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai told reporters that he has sent a team to verify the identity of the plane wreckage.

“Whatever wreckage found needs to be further verified before we can ever confirm that it is belonged to MH370,” he said.

The discovery is unlikely to alter the seabed search, said Australian Transport Safety Bureau Chief Commissioner Martin Dolan, who is heading up the hunt in a remote patch of ocean far off the west coast of Australia. If the find proved to be part of the missing aircraft, it would be consistent with the theory that the plane crashed within the 46,000 square mile search area, 1,100 miles southwest of Australia, he said.

“It doesn’t rule out our current search area if this were associated with MH370,” Dolan told The Associated Press. “It is entirely possible that something could have drifted from our current search area to that island.”

Dolan said search resources would be better spent continuing the seabed search with sonar and video for wreckage rather than reviving a surface search for debris if the part proved to be from Flight 370.

It was well understood after the aircraft disappeared that if there was any floating debris from the plane, Indian Ocean currents would eventually bring it to the east coast of Africa, said aviation safety expert John Goglia, a former member of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. But the debris is unlikely to provide much help in tracing the oceans currents back to the location of the main wreckage, he said.

“It’s going to be hard to say with any certainty where the source of this was,” he said. “It just confirms that the airplane is in the water and hasn’t been hijacked to some remote place and is waiting to be used for some other purpose. ... We haven’t lost any 777s anywhere else.”