06 March 2024 , 19:00
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Ten years after the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared, questions still remain about its eerie disappearance.
While governments stopped their official search in 2017, experts in the aviation industry have continued to look for answers as to what happened on that fateful day of March 8, 2014. One former air traffic controller and an ex-pilot are 'convinced' the plane was steered by a pilot off-course for several hours before crashing into the Indian Ocean.
As the flight was headed for Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, it seemingly vanished with signals lost as they entered Vietnamese airspace. Using primary radar, the Malaysian Air Force indicated that the flight made a sharp left turn, and headed back.
An expert has said government officials have been searching the wrong area for MH370 (AFP/Getty Images)Around the island of Penang, it flew north-west and out over the Andaman Sea, where it dropped off radar. But the flight was linked up over the next six hours with another Indian Ocean satellite. Using this data and drift modelling from debris found, experts forecast the plane flew southward before exhausting its fuel and plunging into the southern ocean, somewhere between south-western Australia and Antarctica - an area labelled as the 7th arc.
"We're confident only an experienced pilot could do it," Jean Luc Marchand, former air traffic manager at Eurocontrol said in a new BBC documentary, Why Planes Vanish: The Hunt for MH370. "They took care to be invisible, not traceable, to not be followed."
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The 'seventh arc' was established in the hunt for MH370 (Google Earth)The documentary, which airs tonight ahead of the 10-year anniversary on Friday, examines various reports of evidence, hearing from experts as well as some of the victim's families. Jean, along with retired commercial pilot Captain Patrick Belly, believe a 'skilled pilot' was in control up until the moment it crashed around seven hours later.
To keep the aircraft out of view, the pair argue the person in the controls shut off the power to satellite phones, leaving the crew without contact with the ground. While pilots have the power to switch off controls, they can also override the plane's automatic air pressure - in the event there is a technical malfunction.
Ex-pilot Belly says in the documentary: "The problem was that the passengers, crew, were going to find the plane was no longer going to Beijing. My theory is that MH370 was depressurised. It's quite easy for a pilot to depressurise an aircraft - all you have to do is switch the valves to manual."
Captain Belly is 'convinced' their theory is the only explanation (BBC)When a plane is depressurised, air is sucked out of the cabin. In this event, emergency oxygen masks would have enabled passengers to survive for around 20 minutes but equipment in the cockpit would give a pilot access to more than 20 hours of oxygen, the fascinating documentary states.
"This made it possible to neutralise all the people behind in the cabin," Belly continued. "The person who took control of this plane did something extraordinary, which led to the death of 239 passengers and put it at the bottom of the Indian Ocean and we have no idea why he did that. This case, I am convinced was executed by someone who was a pilot because no one else was capable on this plane".
The experts aren't alone in thinking the doomed plane was piloted before it crashed. Retired aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey, who has worked with NASA, Boeing and Airbus, is a volunteer expert working on cracking the case of missing MH370.
Featured in the BBC documentary, he says he has been working eight hours a day for the past decade delving into what could have happened. "In my mind, there is no aviation mystery that cannot be solved," he declared in the doc. "Aircraft do not vanish. They always leave a trail of breadcrumbs - might be a trail of physical or electronic evidence. Thorough searches led us to somewhat the end of the road. Have we missed something?"
Using pioneering technology, Mr Godfrey has looked to radio signals, which have coverage across the Indian Ocean. He claims to have found evidence of the plane's final flight path using Weak Signal Propagation Reporter, known as WSPR.
Transmitters send pulses every two minutes and when an aircraft crosses a radio signal, it is disturbed. Every signal is logged in a database and on March 8, 2014, minute disturbances are traces of MH370, the expert argues.
"I found a disturbance on the night it disappeared," he continued. "I picked it up again, and had a eureka moment." Mr Godfrey has pinpointed 130 disturbances over the Indian Ocean, with it ending just past the underwater search from the 7th arc in a radius of around 30km.
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Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 pilots Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah (left) and Co-Pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid (Facebook)He added: "We haven't found it because we didn't look wide enough. It goes beyond where it ran out of fuel because it made changes to speed, and altitude. It implies an active pilot right until the end of the flight."
The flight was commanded by 53-year-old senior pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who had worked for the airline for 30 years, and first officer Fariq Hamid, 27, who was on his final training flight. Speculation has been rife over the years around Zaharie's mental state, with reports stating his wife had left him the day before the fateful day over his alleged affairs.
Meanwhile, as highlighted in the doc, Zaharie flew a simulated flight deep into the remote southern Indian Ocean less than a month before the plane vanished in similar circumstances. The controversial details, which many claim Malaysia withheld from a public report, appear to be the strongest evidence that the captain deliberately steered the plane off-path as part of an elaborate murder-suicide plot.
A document, obtained by New York magazine, revealed the FBI recovered six deleted data points that had been stored on an elaborate Microsoft Flight Simulator X program. The data points show a 'flight' that leaves Kuala Lumpur, heads northwest over the Malacca Strait, then turns left and heads south over the Indian Ocean, continuing until fuel exhaustion over an empty stretch of sea.
Search officials believe MH370 followed a similar route, based on signals the plane transmitted to a satellite after ceasing communications and turning off course. While the actual and simulated flight details were not identical, the jet's assumed endpoint is the same as that of the simulated flight - some 900 miles from the remote patch of southern ocean where officials believe the plane went down.
Malaysian authorities have repeatedly refuted claims Zahaire deliberately flew the plane into the sea, and did not include the details of the flight simulator in the Factual Report released on the first anniversary of the disappearance. And in 2018, Australian investigators rejected claims that the missing flight was deliberately brought down by the pilot. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau maintains that the pilot was unconscious during the final moments, with the plane out of control.
*Why Planes Vanish: The Hunt for MH370 airs tonight at 8pm on BBC One