Home » News » MH370 news: investigator’s huge claim, journo’s salacious theory and Dick Smith’s airfare levy proposal

28 February, 2019

MH370 news: investigator’s huge claim, journo’s salacious theory and Dick Smith’s airfare levy proposal

There have been some interesting developments in the case of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, and Travel Weekly is here to break them down for you.

The first is the claim of a private investigator into the 2014 disaster, in which the flight carrying 239 people went missing on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Noel O’Gara is of the belief that flight MH370 was mistakenly shot down by the Malaysian military, and told the Daily Star that there are witnesses who can account for this and help locate the missing plane, unless the Malaysian government has already covered up the blunder.

Another theory about the disappearance of flight MH370 has also been getting a lot of attention from numerous media outlets.

In the recently launched book The Hunt for MH370, journalist and author Ean Higgins has floated the theory that MH370 captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah planned the crash so he could meet his mistress on a boat in the southern Indian Ocean, so the two could disappear and start new lives together.

Higgins names Qantas’s former manager of flight training and veteran airline captain, David Shrubb, as the source of the theory.

Meanwhile, veteran Aussie aviator Dick Smith has urged airlines to introduce a small levy on fares to raise money for another search of flight MH370.

Smith told The Australian that a levy of 10 cents per fare could raise as much as $350 million towards a new ocean search, given 3.5 billion people travelled by air each year.

These recent developments come after one of the MH370 pilot’s relatives revealed they were the mystery person who answered a phone call from Shah just weeks before the plane crashed.

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Email the Travel Weekly team at traveldesk@travelweekly.com.au

Latest comments

Bruce says:
March 9, 2019 at 1:16 pm
Your logic is flawed as the tax is suggested for Austrlalian flights. You even use the word “SHARED” yet this is all on us and not “shared” with anyone, not even those who are accountable. It woudl be a different argument if a levy was on all flights (or all international flights) worldwide.
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Rob Talbot says:
March 7, 2019 at 9:49 am
It has everything to do with commonly shared humanity, including compassion for the grieving family members and friends.
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Rob Talbot says:
March 7, 2019 at 9:45 am
Screw ten cents, make it a dollar, let’s find that sucker. I have my own theory about the location of the plane, by the way. Looks like there are so many other theories, it’s just adding to the confusion but with enough funding, we can check them all out.
I believe the Malaysian Airlines plane MH370 may not be on the bottom of the ocean. I don’t know why I so believe it but it’s just a feeling.This is not a conspiracy theory, by the way, I’m not suggesting any abduction of passengers or any such thing.
I believe there was a catastrophic failure of the onboard controls and instruments, possibly caused by an explosion of some kind, because parts of a similar type of aircraft were washed up on the Eastern coast of Africa. Those parts took a long time to show up and with the right currents, it is possible for them to have made their way across the Indian Ocean.
My theory is that the pilot, who had lost radio communication and almost all control of the aircraft, nevertheless managed to bring it around in a curve toward land. With all of his instruments out, the only viable landfall he could rely on would be the West Australian mainland.
Now, imagine this, a heavy passenger plane brought down close to sea level, beneath radar detection, manoeuvred across a vast unpopulated stretch of coastline and maybe even managing to land, though more likely it would break up on the rough terrain and where would it be? My guess is, right in the middle of the Great Sandy Desert.
I suggested this at the time the plane crashed and the search began, hoping to get some interest so a search would be made, even a sweep by satellite in that region but heard nothing back from it. It might just be speculation but it did seem entirely possible to me then and remains so.
Of the plane parts that have shown up, one part I remember was an ‘elevator’ that controls airflow at the back of the wing. If the plane was hit by a missile or damaged by a bomb secreted in the wing, that would explain the parts falling off, as well as the loss of communication and control. Perhaps he could only bank wide to the left. That would bring him around in a thousand mile sweep over West Australia. The parts that detached had ample time to drift across the Indian Ocean by the time they were found.
So I looked for someone who could fund an expedition and came up with Elon Musk. I was going to try Richard Branson but I got a reply from the official site for Elon Musk, supposedly from the man himself. He says he’s interested and after this week’s business is finished, he’ll devote serious attention to it. You’d know about this week’s rocket launch. It docked at the international space station and I imagine it has yet to return. I’m hoping he holds true to his word and arranges a satellite scan of the area I suggested. Even if it proves false, I can stop worrying about it then. But why does it keep eating away at me?
I’m not suggesting so much that the plane shot down, definitely, but more that it was damaged by an explosion of ‘some kind’. It might have been a bomb placed on board, or a surface-to-air missile or even, since it was over Indonesian airspace, some kind of mistaken identification of the plane as hostile. Whatever the cause of the damage, my theory of where it might have gone is the main theme here. Maybe not into the ocean at all. Western Australia is sparsely populated and it’s entirely possible for a plane to cross that coastline undetected.
I think they’re just so certain it went into the sea, the plane could remain undetected in the vast expanse of the Great Sandy Desert precisely because they just wont entertain any other possibility but a crash into the sea. They may have searched around Borneo and Sumatra but I’m thinking of a wider field caused by the difficulty of keeping control of a damaged aircraft. It might have been an act of extreme heroism that we’ll never learn about. The ‘Great Sandy’ Desert is a bit of a misnomer. It has craggy outcrops that you wouldn’t want to try to land a jet plane in amongst. It would break up completely and thus the black box recorders (an Australian invention by the way) would have been destroyed, as rugged as they are. Well, that’s my contribution anyway.
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Bruce says:
February 28, 2019 at 5:38 pm
Why would we levy anything on pax for this? Its a Malaysian Airlines plan on a flight from Malaysia to China – it has nothing to do with Australia!
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sting says:
February 28, 2019 at 1:58 pm
….make that 20 dickie… half goes to charity..
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