Route to Indian Ocean on captain of missing jet’s flight simulator

DATA RECOVERED from a home flight simulator owned by the captain of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 showed that someone used the device to plot a course to the southern Indian Ocean, where the missing jet is believed to have crashed, Australian officials have said.

Confusion has reigned over what was found on Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s flight simulator since New York magazine reported last week that an FBI analysis showed he had conducted a simulated flight to the southern Indian Ocean less than a month before the plane vanished along a similar route.

Malaysia rejected the report as false, but Australia’s Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre confirmed yesterday that the captain’s simulator did indeed show that “someone had plotted a course to the southern Indian Ocean”.

The Boeing 777 vanished with 239 people on board after flying far off course during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing on March 8 2014.

New York magazine cited the discovery as strong evidence that the disappearance was a premeditated act of mass murder-suicide at the hands of the captain.

But Malaysia’s national police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said police had never handed any document or information to any authority abroad, including the FBI – a perplexing statement, given that Malaysia’s own transport minister confirmed two years ago that Malaysia was working with the FBI to analyse data from the simulator’s hard drives.

Adding to the confusion, the Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre, which is overseeing the search for the plane off Australia’s west coast, subsequently issued a vague statement that seemed to imply such a route had been found on Capt Zaharie’s machine.

The agency then warned that evidence of the route did not prove that he had planned to steer the plane off course.