PILOT’S DEATH ‘PRACTICE’
Lost Malaysia flight a ‘slay-suicide’
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was likely steered into the sea intentionally by its own captain in a pre-planned mass-murder-suicide, according to a new report.
Months before the flight’s disappearance, its captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, used a homemade flight simulator to rehearse the trip that would take the plane to its presumed resting place deep in the Indian Ocean, New York magazine reported Friday.
The captain “conducted a simulated flight deep into the remote southern Indian Ocean less than a month before the plane vanished under uncannily similar circumstances,” the magazine reported, citing newly uncovered documents.
It took the FBI to discover the grim news of the captain’s apparent suicide test runs, according to the magazine’s report.
After the Boeing 777 disappeared in March 2014 — with 239 passengers and crew aboard — Malaysian investigators seized the hard drives that Zaharie used to record sessions on “an elaborate home-built flight simulator,” the magazine reports. They found, though, that key data on the hard drives had been deleted.
Malaysian investigators handed the drives over to the FBI, which was able to recover six deleted “data points” stored by the Microsoft Flight Simulator X program in the weeks before the plane vanished, the magazine said.
Each data point records something about the simulated flight, including altitude, speed, location and direction.
The deleted records showed that the captain’s simulated flight departed from Kuala Lumpur, veered over the southern Indian Ocean and then kept going to the point where fuel would be exhausted over an empty stretch of sea.
Search officials believe Flight 370 did exactly that, swerving off course and ceasing communications before plummeting into the water without a trace.
Malaysia has kept under wraps any news of the captain’s apparent simulated suicide test run, but ru- mors of what the FBI had uncovered have long circulated.
Earlier Friday, officials announced that the more than twoyear-long hunt for any remains from the flight would soon be called off. So far, the fruitless search has been the most expensive in aviation history, costing at least $135 million.
The search will be called off once the final 10,000 square kilometers of the total 120,000-squarekilometer search area have been scoured, according to officials.