Official rejects theory MH370 not accident

A despondent Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, troubled over the end of his marriage or some other unbearable sadness, was the only person awake on the doomed plane full of unconscious people, one theory goes.

The pilot disabled communications on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, took a final pass over his hometown, then torpedoed the Boeing 777 into the Indian Ocean, experts insisted.

A competing theory, the official one posited by investigators, says that everybody on the plane — the captain, his co-pilot, more than 200 passengers — was unconscious as the uncontrolled craft ran out of fuel and plunged into the sea.

Four years after MH370 vanished, the debate over what happened to the plane has reignited. A panel of aviation experts assembled by 60 Minutes posited a theory about the final hours of the flight. The man in charge of the Australian Government’s investigation has struck back.

That theory is that Zaharie depressurised the plane after turning off its transponder. Shortly afterwards, everyone else was knocked out by oxygen deprivation.

“What they fail to understand is that while you don an oxygen mask and prevent the worst of the hypoxia situation, you are flying an aircraft at 40,000 feet,” the Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s Peter Foley told MPs at a hearing in Canberra this week. “You are taking an aircraft from sea level to [Australia’s highest mountain] Mount Kosciuszko in 20 minutes, then you are taking it, over the course of a couple of minutes, to the height of Mount Everest plus 1000 feet. You’ll get decompression sickness too.”

He said a similar situation occurred on a cargo plane in the US nearly 25 years ago.

Still, Foley conceded that the MH370 suicide-by-pilot theory was “plausible” and that the ATSB had listened to experts who supported the “controlled ditching” theory.