The ‘suicidal’ pilot of the MH370 Malaysia Airlines flight perfectly ditched the plane into the sea, entombing it and the 239 passengers aboard at the bottom of the ocean, a flight expert has claimed ten years after it disappeared.
British pilot Simon Hardy has said he believes that the plane was sunk into the ocean at a spot that has never been searched before.
The Boeing 777 aircraft vanished from radar while en route from Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. Satellite data showed the plane deviated from its flight path to head over the southern Indian Ocean, where it is believed to have crashed.
There are fears that pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, was responsible for deliberately crashing MH370 in a murder-suicide of a shocking scale, which he committed because of problems in his personal life.
Shah had allegedly split with his wife Fizah Khan, and was said to be furious that a relative, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, had been given a five-year jail sentence for sodomy shortly before he boarded the plane for the flight to Beijing. But the pilot’s wife has angrily denied any personal problems, while other family members and friends said he was a devoted family man and loved his job.
The ‘murder-suicide’ theory was also the conclusion of the first independent study into the disaster by the New Zealand-based air accident investigator, Ewan Wilson.
Boeing 777 pilot has Simon Hardy proposed a theory of where the plane ended up after calculating the most likely positions of its remains, The Sun report.
His work was noticed by the official search team, and so he was invited to join the Australian Transport Safety Bureau and a team of experts in 2015.
He gave his expert opinions and scrutinised his theories using high tech flight simulators until the search ended in 2017.
Mr Hardy’s calculations have put the resting place of the plane just outside the official search area, but he was never given the opportunity to prove this theory.
He said that the ‘suicidal’ pilot carried out his plan to kill all of the passengers in the plane before burying it in a deep trench at the bottom of the sea.
The plane’s flight plan shows an extra 3,000kg fuel was added to the plane before takeoff, along with extra – unrequired – oxygen supplied only to the cockpit. Clues such as these led him to believe his theory.
He told The Sun: ‘It’s an incredible coincidence that just before this aircraft disappears forever, one of the last things that was done as the engineer says nil noted [no oxygen added], then someone else gets on onboard and says it’s a bit low.
‘Well it’s not really low at all,’ he added. ‘It’s a strange coincidence that the last engineering task that was done before it headed off to oblivion was topping up crew oxygen which is only for the cockpit, not for the cabin crew.’
Mr Hardy believes the Captain Shah was aiming to down the plane at the Geelvinck Fracture Zone, a trench which is hundreds of miles long, so he would have had some room for manoeuvre.
This part of the ocean also frequently sees earthquakes, so the jet plane could well be buried under tones of rocks at the bottom of the Southern Indian Ocean by now.
He said the pilot was a ‘meticulous planner’ and so may have taken a level a satisfaction from landing the plane there rather than in a random spot ‘miles from anywhere’.
Mr Hardy told The Sun that a graph showed that 100 out of 5,000 possible routes were equally likely but he ‘knew that wasn’t right, and I knew I could use my mathematical-type mind to try and work out where it went’.
He said he spent months drawing constant speed lines until he found one that was unique, giving him a ‘eureka moment’.
His line showed that if MH370 taken this exact route, its flight speed would have been 488 knots. This is the cruising speed of Boeing 777s which commercial pilots fly at every day.
The British pilot said that if you work backwards, his proposed flight path comes within half a degree of where the plane made its last turn towards the Southern Indian Ocean.
He thinks the extra fuel and oxygen meant the captain could have flown without detection for around seven hours, leaving passengers and crew to fall unconscious and die as he downed the plane.
Debris confirmed or believed to be from the MH370 aircraft has since washed up along the African coast and on islands in the Indian Ocean.
Mr Hardy told The Sun the discovery of downward-facing flaps, used to reduce stalling speed, suggest a manual override.
‘If you want the flaps down, there has to be someone there putting the flaps down,’ he said.
‘If the flaps were down, there is a liquid fuel, then someone is moving a lever and it’s someone who knows what they are doing. It all points to the same scenario.’
But officials have come no closer to working out what happened to the plane.
Discussion about this post