MH370 was ‘manipulated’ off course, report suggests

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, missing since 2014, was probably deliberately steered off course and flown to the southern Indian Ocean, according to a Malaysian government safety report released yesterday.

MH370 vanished on March 8, 2014, en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board. Investigators have never been able to explain why the jet abandoned its route shortly into the flight, traversed Malaysia and then cruised south over the Indian Ocean.

It’s difficult to attribute the change in course to any system failure, according to the report. “It is more likely that such manoeuvres are due to the systems being manipulated,” the report said.

Experts mapped the Boeing 777’s course only after picking through hourly data hookups with a satellite. Extensive sonar searches of remote waters off Australia’s west coast failed to locate the wreckage.

Yesterday’s 449-page report offered little to solve modern aviation’s biggest mystery — and stopped short of apportioning specific blame. There’s nothing to suggest the plane was evading radar or evidence of behavioural changes in the crew, it said. Significant parts of the aircraft’s power system, including the autopilot function, were probably working throughout the flight, the report said.

“We are unable to determine with any certainty the reasons that the aircraft diverted from its planned route,” Kok Soo Chon, chief inspector of the MH370 investigation team, said outside Kuala Lumpur. “The possibility of third party intervention cannot be excluded.”

Without the help of cockpit data recorders, search teams could only guess what happened in the flight’s final moments. Analysis by the Australian government suggested MH370 ran out of fuel before plummeting — at as much as 25,000 feet a minute — into the water. Other investigators speculated that a person was at the controls until the very end, gliding the plane into the ocean beyond the furthest limit of any search area.

Yesterday’s report didn’t support either theory explicitly but struggled to come up with an explanation for the aircraft’s deviations.

“The change in flight path likely resulted from manual inputs,” it said. The loss of communications before veering off track was likely due to systems “being turned off” rather than a malfunction.