Four years ago, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH370) crashed into the Indian Ocean. No one has found the plane or bodies of the 239 people who perished on the flight. Some debris washed on shore in France and Africa.
Now aviation experts have said that the pilot deliberately crashed the plane.
Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, piloted the plane. These experts believe he “depressurized the plane, knocking out anyone who wasn’t wearing an oxygen mask,” which would “explain the silence from the plane as it veered wildly off course.”
From The Washington Post:
But the “60 Minutes” team — which included aviation specialists, the former Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief in charge of investigating MH370’s crash, and an oceanographer — put forth what they believe is the most likely theory.“The thing that gets discussed the most is that at the point where the pilot turned the transponder off, that he depressurized the airplane, which would disable the passengers,” said Larry Vance, a veteran aircraft investigator from Canada. “He was killing himself. Unfortunately, he was killing everyone else onboard. And he did it deliberately.”
Vance noted the debris people found because the pieces show “that the pilot actually had control and that it was not a high speed crash” like the wing washed up in Africa: “The front of it would be pressed in and hollow. The water would invade inside and it would just explode from the inside. So this piece would not even exist.”
Boeing 777 senior pilot and instructor Simon Hardy said that Zaharie’s “unexpected turn to the left” helps the suicide theory:
“Captain Zaharie dipped his wing to see Penang, his home town,” Simon Hardy, a Boeing 777 senior pilot and instructor, said on “60 Minutes.”“If you look very carefully, you can see it’s actually a turn to the left, and then start a long turn to the right. And then [he does] another left turn. So I spent a long time thinking about what this could be, what technical reason is there for this, and, after two months, three months thinking about this, I finally got the answer: Someone was looking out the window.”“It might be a long, emotional goodbye,” Hardy added. “Or a short, emotional goodbye to his home town.”
So Hardy believes the Zaharie had complete control of the plane until the end, even though others have a “death dive” scenario with no one in control. After all, Zaharie flew that extra 115 miles, which has led Hardy to believe that the crash “was a mission by one of the crew to hide the aircraft as far away from civilization as possible” and “puts us way outside the search area.”
From WaPo:
But the “60 Minutes” experts tried to answer one of the biggest questions surrounding the flight: How could a modern aircraft tracked by radar and satellites simply disappear?Because, they say, Zaharie wanted it to. And the veteran pilot, who had nearly 20,000 hours of flight experience and had built a flight simulator in his home, knew exactly how to do it.For example, at one point, he flew near the border of Malaysia and Thailand, crisscrossing into the airspace of both, Hardy said. But neither country was likely to see the plane as a threat because it was on the edge of their airspace.“Both of the controllers aren’t bothered about this mysterious aircraft because, oh, it’s gone, it’s not in our space anymore,” Hardy said. “If you were commissioning me to do this operation and try to make a 777 disappear, I would do the same thing. As far as I’m concerned, it’s very accurate flying, and it did the job.”
Chinese, Australian, and Malaysian officials called off the search in January 2017.
In December 2016, Australia’s Transportation Safety Bureau suggested that officials expand the search area. These officials discovered “that a review of the data used to estimate where the plane crashed, coupled with new information on ocean currents, strongly suggested the plane hit the water in a 9,700-square mile area directly north of the search zone.”
Australia’s government said no way because “the results of the experts’ analysis weren’t precise enough to justify continuing the hunt.”
Former military pilot and former chief pilot at easyJet Mike Keane thinks based on the analysis from 60 Minutes that the government “should abandon its ‘ghost flight’ theory,” which states that no one had control of the plane:
“You may recall my observation of ‘complicity to a crime’ if the ATSB cling to their version of events when they have knowledge to the contrary,” Keane told the Australian. “Put bluntly, the MH370 ‘crash’ is undoubtedly a crime of the unlawful killing of 238 innocent people. The Australian government has also been remiss, they should have put pressure on the ATSB to listen, and act, on professional advice from the aviation community.”
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