What happened to flight MH370?

Experts offer chilling theory of Malaysia Airlines crash

All but one of the 239 people on the doomed Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 had probably been unconscious — incapacitated by the sudden depressurization of the Boeing 777 — and had no way of knowing that they were on an hourslong, meandering path to their deaths.

Along that path, a panel of aviation experts said Sunday, was a brief but telling detour near Penang, Malaysia, the hometown of Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

On two occasions, whoever was in control of the plane — and was probably the only one awake — tipped the craft to the left.

The experts believe Zaharie, the plane’s pilot, was taking a final look.

That is the chilling theory that the team of analysts assembled by Australia’s 60 Minutes have posited about the final hours of MH370.

They suspect that the plane’s 2014 disappearance and apparent crash was a suicide by the 53-year-old Zaharie — and a premeditated act of mass murder.

But first, the experts said, they believe Zaharie depressurized the plane, knocking out anyone aboard who wasn’t wearing an oxygen mask. That would explain the silence from the plane as it veered wildly off course. That would also explain how whoever was in control had time to maneuver the plane to its final location. The 60 Minutes team — which included aviation specialists, the former Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief in charge of investigating MH370’s crash and an oceanographer — put forth what they believe is the most likely theory.

“The thing that gets discussed the most is that at the point where the pilot turned the transponder off, that he depressurized the airplane, which would disable the passengers,” said Larry Vance, a veteran aircraft investigator from Canada. “He was killing himself. Unfortunately, he was killing everyone else onboard. And he did it deliberately.”

Flight 370 disappeared March 8, 2014, shortly after leaving Kuala Lumpur, with 239 people aboard who believed they were bound for Beijing.

The craft is thought to have crashed in the far southern Indian Ocean.

The governments of Malaysia, China and Australia called off the official search in January 2017. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s final report said authorities were no closer to knowing the reasons for the plane’s disappearance or the exact location of its wreckage.

But the 60 Minutes experts tried to answer one of the biggest questions surrounding the flight: How could a modern aircraft tracked by radar and satellites simply disappear?

Because, they say, Zaharie wanted it to. And the veteran pilot, who had nearly 20,000 hours of flight experience and had built a flight simulator in his home, knew exactly how to do it.

Still, as News.com.au wrote, the experts’ hypotheses are just theories — and not entirely new ones.

Zaharie and co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid were prime suspects in the plane’s disappearance from the beginning. The wreckage, of course, might provide some insight about what caused the airplane to crash, and crews were still looking for it as recently as this year.

The latest attempt to discover it was a $70 million effort by a Texas company called Ocean Infinity, according to the Associated Press.

Ocean Infinity CEO Oliver Plunkett said the company’s technology had performed “exceptionally well” and collected “significant amounts of highquality data.”

Still, it found no trace of MH370.