Malaysia knows where the wreckage of doomed flight MH370 is but refuses to acknowledge the ‘shameful truth’ about the crash, ‘s leading aviation expert says.
Geoffrey Thomas, a 50-year aviation industry veteran, said the Malaysia Airlines plane’s remains lie 1,933km due west of Perth after experts traced the final flightpath of the plane.
Mr Thomas said aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey has tracked the route of plane using radio waves and believes ‘one more search in 2024’ will reveal its final resting place.
Analysis of the plane’s final moments and the recovered debris found the pilot was ‘was pushing down on the control column’ to crash the plane in a high-speed dive, designed to ‘ensure the aircraft broke up into as many pieces as possible’.
Mr Thomas said the decade of speculation since the plane vanished had left relatives of the victims ‘on a ghastly rollercoaster ride as ridiculous theories are floated’.
‘What the MH370 crash was, is pilot suicide and mass murder of the worst kind, because no-one could escape,’ he told Daily Mail .
But Mr Thomas said the Malaysian government has previously refused to instigate a fresh search and the pilot’s family had rejected ‘what obviously happened’.
Captain Zaharie had built his own flight simulator in a bedroom on which investigators found the doomed MH370 flight path he’d tested then wiped before March 7, 2014
The diverted flight path of MH370 flew almost seven hours south and crashed into the sea ‘in a high-speed dive designed to ensure the aircraft broke up into as many pieces as possible’
On Monday, Malaysian Transport Minister Loke Siew Fook finally announced the country may renew the hunt for the missing plane, which disappeared 10 years ago.
‘OBSESSED AND SUICIDAL’ PILOT
It comes after growing international concern among aviation and aerospace experts that Malaysia was refusing to revive the search which was halted in 2018, even though it had been offered a ‘no-find, no-fee’ proposal by a US marine search company.
The Malaysia Airlines flight departed for Beijing from Kuala Lumpur on the evening of March 7, 2014 but diverted from its planned flight path and turned south before it vanished.
The plane, carrying 227 passengers including seven ns, and 12 crew, is believed to have crashed into the Indian Ocean.
It was later revealed the pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah had practised the flight on his own home-made flight simulator, and had been having well-documented mental and marital problems, said Mr Thomas.
He was also openly ranting against the Malaysian government on Facebook and sending obsessive, sexualised messages to a pair of twin sister models aged in their 20s.
‘The pilot committed suicide obviously. He flew the same route that he had taken on his own flight simulator, going off the standard route and flying due south,’ Mr Thomas said.
‘(Captain Zaharie) wiped it off his simulator, but the Malaysians recovered it. My understanding is Malaysia Airlines knew that night that the captain was responsible.
‘He had exhibited all sorts of strange tendencies – he was stalking the models, posting anti-government stuff on Facebook.
‘No country wants to own an air crash. It’s a massive dent to their national pride, and no-one wants to own a suicide.’
Debris from the MH370 crash formed a trail across the Indian Ocean, washing up on islands like Reunion and Madagascar and the coast of eastern Africa
Zaharie was obsessed with twin sister Malaysian models Qi Min Lan and Lan Qi Hui, then 26, begging them to come to Kuala Lumpur and sending creepy comments on Facebook
Mr Thomas said Zaharie’s rabid political rants in the year leading up to the MH370 disaster should have seen him fired.
‘It should have raised serious alarm bells with the airline that you have someone flying who has such strong anti-government views,’ he said.
‘If a Qantas pilot did something like that, he would be spoken to and grounded.
‘In 50 years [as an aviation expert] I’ve covered 10 pilot suicides – there’s been 13 or 14 of major aircraft, and usually you have the most monumental cover-up.
‘I don’t think the Malaysians want to find MH370 and wish it would go away.’
PM’S BOMBSHELL CLAIM
n Prime Minister at the time, Tony Abbott, said top Malaysian officials believed Captain Zaharie had deliberately downed the jet soon after it vanished.
UK aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey has charted MH370’s flight path once it was hijacked by the captain and flown until it ran out of fuel and crashed into the Indian Ocean
Aishah Zaharie (pictured with her father, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, pilot of MH370) left after the crash and did not respond to inquiries about the disaster 10 years on
‘My very clear understanding, from the very top levels of the Malaysian government, is that from very early on, they thought it was murder-suicide by the pilot,’ Mr Abbott said.
A Malaysian-led investigation in 2018 said the plane’s course was changed manually but did not name a suspect, and said the cause of the disappearance couldn’t be determined until the wreckage and the plane’s black boxes are found.
Mr Thomas said it was uncertain if they would be operational after 10 years on the ocean floor, and there was an urgent need to find them now that Mr Godfrey had charted Captain Zaharie fatal flight path.
TELL-TALE RADIO TRACES
Mr Godfrey, former lead engineer for the European Space Agency Spacelab, tracked the flight path using weak radio signals continually produced by amateur radio operators that cover the earth.
The technology, known as ‘weak signal propagation report’ or WSPR, used the radio waves as ‘electronic tripwires’ that triggered invisible signals when aircraft crossed them.
Mr Thomas said that since 2009 a record of all the waves has been kept on an international data base.
‘If you go back to March 8, 2014 you can start tracking MH370 by the disturbance,’ he said.
Richard Godfrey’s report tracks MH370 from take-off, on its accepted flight path to the point where it was nearing Vietnamese air space when the plane dropped out of contact, and then for the six-and-a-half hours it flew until it crashed into the sea.
Captain Zaharie with his wife Faizah Khan (above) was said by a 777 pilot friend to be in a fragile emotional state with his marriage crumbling in the months before the disaster
MH370’s remains lie 1933km due west of Perth at a depth of 4,000m in a very mountainous area with deep ravines and a volcano according to Richard Godfrey’s analysis
Leading aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas said the MH370 next of kin ”have been on a ghastly roller coaster ride’ since the crash and it was up to the Malaysian government to acknowledge the truth
An hour into the flight Zaharie spoke the last words the world would hear from MH370 before turning the plane around and heading south: ‘Good night. Good night. Malaysian three-seven-zero.’
The Boeing 777 crashed because it ran out of fuel, but Mr Thomas believes the passengers and crew would long have been dead.
PASSENGERS ‘PUT TO SLEEP’
‘Hopefully (Zaharie) put them all to sleep by depressurising the plane, to disable everybody, to prevent people from breaking into cockpit,’ he said.
‘The co-pilot could easily have been gotten rid of – “get me a glass of water” – and as soon as he’s out of cockpit you put the “deny entry” on lock. He then would have donned his own oxygen supply.’
In the immediate wake of the disaster, Captain Zaharie’s family and friends angrily refuted that the pilot had been distracted, withdrawn and possibly suicidal before the doomed flight.
The pilot’s daughter Aishah Zaharie, then a Deakin University architecture student in Geelong, wrote on Facebook in the weeks afterward about a Daily Mail report of the pilot’s mental state ‘You can bet your ass I will not forgive you’.
Zaharie’s wife, Faizah Khanum Mustafa Khan, denied she had said her husband ‘retreated into a shell’, spending time alone in the room with the flight simulator he had built himself.
However, It has since emerged that Zaharie was probably clinically depressed, that his wife had moved out of the house where he had the flight simulator and into their second house.
‘Family hit out, they always do,’ Mr Thomas said. ‘But it is important to recover the plane and solve the mystery … it’s closure for the relatives [of the passengers and other crew].’
A young Captain Zaharie (above) became a senior Malaysia Airlines pilot but a year before the crash began anti-government rants on Facebook which should have set off alarm bells
The daughter of the MH370 pilot Aishah Zaharie was studying architecture in Melbourne at the time of the disaster and now works as an architect in Malaysia, for firm Akiprima
Aishah Zaharie has since been quoted as saying she her father had changed and during her final conversation with him ‘she barely recognised him’.
An unconfirmed News Corp report claimed Ms Zaharie added: ‘He wasn’t the father I knew. He seemed disturbed and lost in a world of his own’.
Ms Zaharie now works as an architect for the firm Akiprima in Selangor, Malaysia, after having worked for Port Philip Building Services in Melbourne and ZH&S architects in Kuala Lumpur, according to her linkedin.com profile.
Neither Ms Zaharie, nor her mother Faizah Khanum Mustafa Khan, nor the pilot’s sister Sakinab Shah responded to Daily Mail ‘s inquiries about MH370 and Captain Zaharie.
CREEPY MESSAGES TO TWIN MODELS
According to a report by The Atlantic aviation expert William Langewiesche, Captain Zaharie’s chaotic personal life and fragile emotional state likely caused him to crash the plane.
A 777 pilot and lifelong friend of Zaharie told Langewiesche he had come to that conclusion reluctantly.
‘Zaharie’s marriage was bad. In the past he slept with some of the flight attendants. And so what? We all do,’ he said.
‘You’re flying all over the world with these beautiful girls in the back. But his wife knew.’
He admitted Zaharie’s emotional state ‘may have been a factor.’
Zaharie became obsessed with Qi Min Lan, one of two model sisters, sending 97 Facebook posts including invitations to visit and sexualised messages
Zaharie’s message to Qi Min Lan after she posted a photo of herself in the satin robe was ‘just shower?’
As well as sending Facebook messages to the twin models, Qi Min Lan and her twin Lan Qi Hui, then 26, begging them to come to Kuala Lumpur where he lived with his wife, Zaharie bombarded them with creepy comments.
When Qi Min Lan posted a photo of herself in a bathrobe, he wrote, ‘Just shower?’
Zaharie also revealed publicly on his own Facebook page his disgust with the ruling regime, branding then-Prime Minister Najib Razak a ‘moron’ and posting 119 times before the 2013 election.
‘The posts and messages in Malay were recorded,’ Mr Thomas said. The pilot directed 97 separate Facebook comments at Qi Min Lan, his ‘favourite’ of the sisters.
Ms Min said later that she did not know Zaharie at all, and that he had been ‘just a social network’s fan of mine’.
‘I have many followers in my social network – he is just one of them. Anyhow the pilot no disturb my life because I no reply to him at all.’
Captain Zaharie and his wife Faizah (above) had grown apart in the years leading up to the crash and a fellow pilot said his emotional state ‘may have a been a factor’ in the crash
LARGEST HUNT IN HISTORY
Immediately after the crash it was , working on Malaysia’s behalf, which coordinated what became the largest and most expensive search in aviation history.
From October 2014 to January 2017, a comprehensive survey was made of 120,000 km of sea floor about 1800km southwest of Western .
During those years an extraordinary debris trail across the Indian Ocean left parts washing up on islands such as Reunion and Madagascar and on the coast of eastern Africa.
But the main body of the aircraft has never been recovered.
Richard Godfrey said the amount of debris showed that the crash was ‘anything but a soft landing on the ocean’.
‘The level of damage with fractures on all sides and the extreme force of the penetration right through the debris items leads to the conclusion that the end of the flight was in a high-speed dive,’ he said.
On 22 January 2018, a search by private US marine exploration company Ocean Infinity began.
Ocean Infinity used the ship Sea Bed Constructor (above) to search for MH 370 in 2018 and the private US marine exploration company will now recommence the hunt for the plane
This last search for MH370 was approved by the Malaysian government, provided payment of up to $70m would be made only if the wreckage is found.
The search ended unsuccessfully in June that year, and in March 2019 the Malaysian Government said it was only willing to look at any ‘credible leads or specific proposals’ regarding any further searches.
‘Ocean Infinity stated it was ready to resume the search on the same no-fee no-find basis based on Richard Godfrey’s research, but the Malaysian Government has shown no interest, citing the “no new credible leads” reason,’ Mr Thomas said.
The Malaysian Government has now said it would be willing to recommence a search using Ocean Infinity.
Aishah Zaharie (above in Sydney) lived and studied in but now works as an architect in Malaysia with her family not publicly commenting about MH370
On Monday, the company’s CEO, Oliver Plunkett said it hoped to ‘get back to the search soon’ now the government had invited the firm to discuss resuming the search called off six years ago.
Mr Thomas said despite Malaysia previously saying there had been no new credible leads, Mr Godfrey’s flight path and ocean drift analysis showed investigators had explored the wrong area of seabed.
He believed it was time for the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) to take over the crash investigation and retrieve the plane from the bottom of the ocean.
Richard Godfrey’s report states that MH370 impacted the ocean west of Perth at 33.177°S 95.300°E and lies at a depth of 4,000m in a very mountainous area with deep ravines and a volcano.
He said the crash location area, found using the WSPR technology and drift analysis by the University of Western , had not been previously searched.
‘MH370 is an extraordinary event almost unprecedented in modern history,’ Mr Thomas said.
‘But it has been made more of a mystery because of the reluctance of Malaysia, which seems to find every reason not to go look for it.
‘After Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic in June 2009, they didn’t discover it for three years and the black boxes were both readable and they were able to extract all the data.
‘After 10 years, who knows?’
MH370 WHAT HAPPENED: 438 MINUTES FROM TAKEOFF TO DISASTER
16:42, March 7, 2014: MH370 takes off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport with 239 passengers and crew including pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid. Six ns are on board.
MH370’s flight path is initially in accordance with the flight plan from Kuala Lumpur International Airport runway 32 right to Beijing until the plane reaches waypoint IGARI.
17:20: MH370 is almost at waypoint IGARI and about to handover between the Singapore Flight Information Region (FIR) and the Ho Chi Minh FIR.
There are six other aircraft in the vicinity, including Finnair Flight 82 from Helsinki to Singapore, Lufthansa Flight 779 from Singapore to Frankfurt and Garuda Flight 890 from Chongqing to Beijing.
This is the likely point when Captain Zaharie locked the co-pilot out of the cockpit to turn the plane around onto the same flight path south that was later found on his flight simulator.
The WSPR technology uses the weak radio signals which cover the earth (above) and the disturbances recorded when an aircraft passes through the waves
17:38: Instead of continuing on its flight path to Beijing, MH370 takes a diversion flight path back across the Malaysian peninsula, crossing the coast of Malaysia close to Kota Bharu Airport and heading towards Penang and the Malacca Strait.
17:46:34: Terminal Area Radar at the Royal Malaysian Air Force base at Butterworth picks up MH370.
16:08 – 16:12: The aircraft follows the coastline of Sumatra. It is a dark night with no moon and by 16:22 the pilot would have been able to pick out the lights of airports like Banda Aceh.
16:30: The plane turns around the tip of Sumatra and at 19:41:03 crosses the 2nd Arc. MH370 was ‘interrogated’ ever hour for seven hours by an Inmarsat satellite over the Indian Ocean, and each of these are called ‘arcs’ numbered one to seven.
18:56 – 18:58: MH370 is detected turning South West then due West back on its track. It is a manoeuvre a pilot would employ to check he was not being followed.
17:58: MH370 is tracking towards a waypoint where the FIRs of Jakarta, Colombo and Melbourne meet. MH370 then heads towards Geraldton, Western .
20:32: The plane turns due South.
21:54: MH370 turns towards the Zaharie Shah home flight simulator end point in the flight from fuel exhaustion. The aircraft increases to full speed at this point.
A UK aerospace engineer has tracked the flight path taken by MH370 before it crashed into the Indian Ocean and says a new search would find the aircraft
22:26: The aircraft turns South West for twenty minutes and then turns due magnetic South at 22:46.
23:54: With 1,521 kg estimated fuel remaining, MH370 crosses the 6th Arc then turns South East on a downwind leg.
00:02: MH370 has an estimated 605 kg of fuel remaining.
00:11: With an estimated 58 kg of fuel remaining, the plane turns downwind again towards the 7th arc.
Winds and turbulence increase and with fuel exhaustion, called dual engine flame out, MH370’s air speed starts to decrease and the aircraft starts to lose altitude.
00:18: The plane’s altitude of 33,000 feet drops to 12,194 feet by 00:19:29.
00:19:37 The altitude is estimated at 11,650 feet and the descent has increased significantly, leading analysts to believe that the pilot was pushing down on the control column at the end of flight.
00:20: MH370 crashes into the sea with 239 people on board.