On March 8, 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 left Kuala Lumpur International Airport en route to Beijing. Less than an hour into the flight, voice contact was made with the pilot for the last time, as the plane flew over the South China Sea.
What happened to the plane after this final contact remains ‘one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history’.
With 239 people on board MH370 seemed to vanish. The plane completely disappeared from all radars. Now, four years later, very little has been found and there is no certainty regarding what actually happened on that fateful night.
A former commercial pilot has now said the flight hasn’t yet been found because authorities refuse to search in the right place.
Byron Bailey flew out of Dubai with Emirates for 15 years. He claims if people had listened to pilots they could have found the plane.
He told Miranda Devine’s podcast:
Us pilots, we think we knew right from the get up and go where the aeroplane was.
If they search there, I think there’s a 90 per cent chance they’ll find it.
Bailey said Malaysia didn’t want the wreckage to be found after offering $70 million to Texas-based firm Ocean Infinity, adding:
The people doing [the search] don’t have any aviation experience… but they have stubbornly refused for four years to search 130km south of where it ran out of fuel.
[Malaysian Airlines realised] this could be a massive liability and political problem if it’s proved that the Muslim captain hijacked the airplane.
[The Australian Government] is being cowardly and sticking its head in the sand… it’s a murder of 138 people and they’re ignoring that.
Bailey also said it was ‘about time the Chinese showed some interest’ and hopes they ‘step in where we were too cowardly.’
Ocean Infinity chef executive Oliver Plunkett said the search would come to an end after covering over 112,000 square kilometers of remote ocean floor.
He said in a statement:
I would firstly like to extend the thoughts of everyone at Ocean Infinity to the families of those who have lost loved ones on MH370. Part of our motivation for renewing the search was to try to provide some answers to those affected.
It is therefore with a heavy heart that we end our current search without having achieved that aim.
A panel on 60 Minutes consisting of senior Boeing 777 pilot and instructor Simon Hardy, former senior investigator with Canada’s Transportation Safety Bureau Larry Vance, aviation safety expert Captain John Cox, former Chief Commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau Martin Dolan and John Dawson, a lawyer who represented families in the MH370 and MH17 cases, recently debated the subject
Opinion between the experts was divided between two major theories surrounding the aircraft’s disappearance: that the plane ran out of fuel, or that it was directly crashed into the ocean.
However the main conclusion the experts came to is that the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, deliberately crashed the plane into the ocean in a murder-suicide.
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