Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, along with its passengers, is submerged in an ocean trench after its pilot intentionally crashed the plane as part of a mass-murder-suicide plot, a British aviation expert has claimed. British pilot Simon Hardy was part of the official search for the Boeing 777, which vanished over the South China Sea on March 8, 2014, and was never found.
Satellite data showed that the aircraft deviated from its flight path, diverting toward the southern Indian Ocean, where it is presumed to have crashed. According to The Sun, Hardy utilized state-of-the-art flight simulators to accurately determine the jet's location but wasn't successful in finding the doomed Flight MH370.
New Angle, New Theory
In 2015, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau enlisted Hardy to assist in tracing the missing plane. The aircraft vanished 39 minutes after departing Kuala Lumpur for Beijing, carrying 239 passengers and crew members.
Hardy told the Sun he believes that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, may have intentionally crashed MH370 in a large-scale murder-suicide.
Speculation suggests that personal problems in his life might have driven him to commit such a shocking act.
Shah had allegedly separated from his wife, Fizah Khan, and was reportedly upset over a relative, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, receiving a five-year jail sentence for sodomy around the time of the MH370 flight to Beijing.
However, Shah's wife vehemently denied any personal issues, and other family members and friends claimed that he was a dedicated family man who loved his job.
During the initial investigation, the FBI reportedly arrived at a similar conclusion.
Hardy concluded that Shah planned to bury the aircraft in the Geelvinck Fracture Zone, an extensive trench beneath the southern Indian Ocean.
Although he couldn't substantiate his theory before the search was terminated in 2017, he remains convinced that the plane ended up in this earthquake-prone region.
"If you did manage to get [the plane] in there, you might find you get it buried after a few years by rocks, so it might even be at the bottom of the sea, covered," Hardy told The Sun.
Nothing Conclusive
The first independent study into the MH370 disaster, conducted by New Zealand-based air accident investigator Ewan Wilson, also concluded the 'murder-suicide' theory.
The flight plan of the plane indicated an additional 3,000kg of fuel was loaded before takeoff, and extra, unnecessary oxygen was supplied exclusively to the cockpit. These clues were among the factors that led him to support his theory.
The additional fuel and oxygen could have enabled Shah to clandestinely fly the plane for an extra seven hours into a remote area, causing passengers and crew to lose consciousness before he deliberately crashed the jet, Hardy suggested.
"Imagine Miracle on the Hudson but everyone is already dead," he said.
"Nobody gets out and it sinks to the bottom of the Southern Indian Ocean."
"Where does all the wreckage go? Well, there isn't any, that's why we've been deprived of wreckage."
Only a few fragments of the missing jet, including a flaperon (a part of the wing), were ever recovered. This flaperon was found on the island of Reunion, around 425 miles west of Madagascar. French experts indicated that the flaperon had been in a downward position.
"If the flaps were down ... then someone is moving a lever and it's someone who knows what they are doing," Hardy said.
"It all points to the same scenario."
