[ad_1]
A new documentary released Wednesday by Sky News Australia adds fuel to speculation that a doomed Malaysian Airlines flight was brought down by its own pilot.
In “MH370: The Final Search,” aviation writer and former commercial pilot Mike Glynn said he believes a 22-minute holding pattern discovered in the doomed Boeing’s flight path might hold the key to the jet’s fate.
“There’s no reason to do that,” Glynn said of the circular flight path off the coast of Sumatra, according to news.com.au.
“My theory has always been that it was the captain who is responsible,” he said, suggesting the 22 minutes were a time of “possible negotiation” between the pilot, Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and someone else.
Shah’s motive, Glynn theorized, was anger over the arrest of his distant relative and Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.
Another expert interviewed in the documentary questioned that motive, however.
“Would it be enough for him to take such drastic action without saying he did it?” journalist Ean Higgins said. “That’s difficult to say.”
Authorities have long focused on allegations Shah crashed the jet intentionally.
French investigators reported in 2019 that Shah was likely in control of the plane “until the end.”
Possible motives abound. A report in the Atlantic suggested Shah was clinically depressed and in a bad marriage.
Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told a Sky News documentary crew in 2020 that Malaysian authorities had suspected the crash was an intentional murder-suicide.
“My very clear understanding, from the very top levels of the Malaysian government, is that from very, very early on, they thought it was murder-suicide by the pilot,” Abbott told interviewers.
“I’m not going to say who said what to whom, but let me reiterate, I want to be absolutely crystal clear, it was understood at the highest levels that this was almost certainly murder-suicide by the pilot,” he said.
In Wednesday’s documentary, Malaysia Airlines Crisis Director Fuad Sharuji pushed back on the murder-suicide allegations.
“I don’t see him as a person who could do that,” Mr Sharuji said to news.com.au.
“He has been flying as a Captain on a 777 since 1998 … so a very senior captain.”
The Boeing 777 vanished in 2014 with 239 people aboard. It was slated to fly to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.
Someone in the cockpit made contact with Malaysian air-traffic control just before 1:20 a.m. on March 8, 2014, saying “All right, goodnight.”
The plane failed to check in with controllers in Ho Chi Minh City as it flew into Vietnamese airspace shortly after.
No distress call was received.
Radar shows that the aircraft then veered dramatically off course and flew back over the Malay Peninsula before heading to the Indian Ocean and disappearing entirely.
The 22-minute holding pattern was discovered in 2021 using reports from software that tracks long-distance radio signal propagation between enthusiasts. Aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey looked for disturbances in radio transmissions on the night of the disappearance to track the missing jet, likening the radio signals to “invisible tripwires.”
While debris has washed up in six countries, the bulk of the lost airliner has yet to be found. And search headed up by Australia was called off in 2017. A US robotics company, Ocean Infinity, searched some 50,000 square miles of ocean floor in 2018 to no avail.
[ad_2]