A team of aviation experts has concluded the pilot of the missing Malayasian Airlines 777 probably deliberately crashed the plane. Telltales include a devious weaving flight path to evade radar, a wing dip near the captain’s hometown for a last look, and the lack of any distress calls. Read story here.
Their thinking is that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah depressurized the plane and climbed to 45,000 feet to knock out the passengers and crew, turned off the plane’s transponder and communications to blind ground-based tracking devices, then flew to the Southern Ocean. Shah was a very experienced pilot who knew how to do all of this, and it has been previously reported that he plotted a similar course on his home flight simulator.
Although a few small pieces of debris washed up on western Indian Ocean beaches, and satellite tracking and drift analysis enabled searchers to determine approximately where the plane would have been when it ran out of fuel, the crash site hasn’t been found despite the most extensive search in aviation history.
The search area was calculated based on where the plane would have been if it flew a steady course on autopilot. But what if human hands manually steered an erratic course in the last minutes of flight? Then it wouldn’t be there, would it?