Aviation experts chilling new claims about MH370 pilot

Aviation experts chilling new claims about MH370 pilot
By Alexandra Coulton


Aviation experts claim to have shed new light on the reasons for MH370’s disappearance and it’s the most chilling theory yet.

Simon Hardy, a Senior Boeing 777 pilot and instructor told 60 Minutes the flight’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah used the plane in a murder-suicide mission.

Hardy said Zaharie deliberately avoided detection from Malaysian or Thai military radar by flying along the border and crossing in and out of each country’s airspace.

It was in this area the plane’s transponder switched off.

Hardy told 60 Minutes he discovered this by reconstructing Zaharie’s flight plan from the military radar.

“As the aircraft went across Thailand and Malaysia, it runs down the border, which is wiggling underneath, meaning it’s going in and out of those two countries, which is where their jurisdictions are,” Hardy said.

“So both of the controllers aren’t bothered about this mysterious aircraft. Cause it’s, ‘Oh, it’s gone. It’s not in our space anymore’.”

Hardy said the theory also explains why the flight “dipped the wing” over Penang before ending up so far off course.

According to Hardy, the wing dip was part of an “emotional goodbye” to Zaharie’s hometown before taking a sharp turn and heading south for six hours so he could down the plane where it would “never be found”.

Larry Vance, a former senior investigator with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada also told 60 minutes he supports this theory.

“I think the general public can take comfort in the fact that there is a growing consensus on the plane’s final moments,” Vance said.

“Unfortunately, he was [also] killing everybody else on board, and he did it deliberately,”

“He was taking it to a predestination, someplace that he had planned to take it, and he flew that six hours to get it there.”

Vance also said the plane is not scattered “all over the bottom of the ocean” but largely intact.

“The right wing may be off, the engines are separate, but you basically have four pieces of aeroplane down there,” he said.

A lawyer who represented nine families involved in the incident, John Dawson, told News Corp that evidence pointed to one of the aircrew being responsible.

“In MH370, you have the pilot flying between Malaysia and Beijing who turns back the aircraft. The evidence is so heavily weighted to involvement by one of the aircrew taking this aircraft down,” said Dawson.

“That aircraft has probably depressurised, the people died of asphyxiation, it was premeditated murder. It was highly planned. The bodies have never been found.”

News.com points out that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull also said in 2016 that it was “very likely that the captain planned this shocking event.”

Meanwhile, the search for the missing aircraft has been expanded as it’s deadline looms.

Since January, the Texan-based company tasked with uncovering the plane’s location, Ocean Infinity has covered nearly 80,000 square kilometres of the Indian Ocean, the Guardian reports.

In January, Malaysia signed a “no cure, no fee” deal with Ocean Infinity that finishes in June, as the weather in the southern Indian Ocean worsens.

MH370 originally went missing 8 March 2014 with 239 people on board, while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The Australian lead search was called off in January of last year.

The search was the largest in aircraft history and included Australian, Chinese and Malaysian authorities.

It cost roughly $200 million to fund.

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