On March 8, 2014 a Malaysia Airlines plane, with 239 on board, went missing and one year later investigators still do not know what happened. Could pilot suicide have been the cause?
“Someone was looking at Penang. Someone was taking a long, emotional look at Penang. The captain was from the island of Penang.”
There are times when Captain Simon Hardy’s analysis of flight MH370 sends shivers down the spine, especially in light of the recent case of the Germanwings Airbus flight 4U 9525.
An experienced Boeing 777 captain, he knows the Asian air routes like a commuter knows short cuts home. He flew them for 17 years.
He is convinced about something that no one wants to think is possible - that the captain of the flight, Zaharie Shah, deliberately hid the plane from radar and flew it thousands of miles off course, before it came down in the ocean.
He says the clues are in the route it took after it vanished from air traffic control. It turned back on itself and flew along the border of Malaysia and Thailand.
“It flew in and out of the countries eight times,” he says. “This is probably very accurate flying rather than just a coincidence. As both air traffic controllers in both those countries would probably assume that the aircraft was in the other country’s jurisdiction and not pay it any attention.”
But his most eerie theory comes a little later, as the aircraft skirts around the captain’s home island, Penang,
“It does a strange hook,” he says. “I spent a long time thinking about this and eventually I found that it was a similar manoeuvre to what I’d done in Australia over Ayers Rock. Because the airway goes directly over Ayers Rock, you do not actually see it very well because it disappears under the nose of the aircraft.
“So in order to look at it you have to turn left or right, get alongside it and then execute a long turn. If you look at the output from Malaysian 370, there were actually three turns not one. Someone was looking at Penang.”
Steve Landells, who flew Boeing 777s for a decade and is now a flight-safety expert at the British Airline Pilots Association, is still baffled as to what happened to flight MH370.
“None of the theories answer all the questions or fully explain what did happen that day,” he says.
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