MH370 pilot 'flew plane to 40,000ft so it would become depressurized and the passengers would all die before he crashed it into the ocean while battling depression', new report claims
- Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was pilot-in-command of the Boeing 777 flight
- The plane was carrying 238 passengers and crew and vanished in March 2014
- New report claims the plane was taken to 40,000ft after the controls seized
- It also explores Shah's troubled marriage and his possible troubled mental state
- A friend also claims Shah likely tricked his co-pilot into leaving the cockpit
The pilot of the MH370 flight that disappeared flew to 40,000ft so the aircraft would become depressurized and the passengers would die before he crashed it into the sea, a new report has claimed.
Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was the pilot-in-command when the plane carrying 238 other passengers and crew vanished in March 2014.
The Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 is thought to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, and a safety report in July last year, revealed the plane was likely steered off course manually, before being flown for several hours.
In a new report for The Atlantic, aviation expert William Langewiesche explores the most likely scenario of what happened, and the troubled personal life of Shah.
Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah (pictured) was the pilot-in-command when the plane carrying 238 other passengers and crew vanished in March 2014
A Boeing 777 flaperon cut down to match the one from flight MH370 found on Reunion island off the coast of Africa in 2015, is lowered into water to discover its drift characteristics by Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation researchers in Tasmania
Catherine Gang, whose husband Li Zhi was on board the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, holds a banner as she walks outside Yonghegong Lama Temple after a gathering of family members of the missing passengers in Beijing, on March 8, 2015
On the night the aircraft went missing the controls were seized in the cockpit between 1.10am, when the plane was at around 35,000ft, until 1.21am when it disappeared from the radar.
Electrical engineer Mike Exner told The Atlantic, the plane climbed to 40,000ft in the air 'causing the rapid incapacitation and death of everyone in the cabin.'
'An intentional depressurization would have been an obvious way—and probably the only way—to subdue a potentially unruly cabin in an airplane that was going to remain in flight for hours to come,' adds Mr Langewiesche.
'In the cabin, the effect would have gone unnoticed but for the sudden appearance of the drop-down oxygen masks and perhaps the cabin crew’s use of the few portable units of similar design.
'None of those cabin masks was intended for more than about 15 minutes of use during emergency descents to altitudes below 13,000 feet; they would have been of no value at all cruising at 40,000 feet.
The Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 (stock image) is thought to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, and a safety report in July last year, revealed the plane was likely steered off course deliberately, before being flown for several hours
The lifelong friend says Shah (pictured) likely tricked his co-pilot Fariq Hamid, who was on his final training flight, into leaving the cockpit
'The cabin occupants would have become incapacitated within a couple of minutes, lost consciousness, and gently died without any choking or gasping for air.'
The most prominent, and likely theory, at this stage is that Mr Shah deliberately downed the plane in a murder-suicide.
A lifelong friend, also a 777 pilot, who did not want to be named for fear of the consequences, came to the reluctant conclusion that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah crashed the plane.
The lifelong friend says Shah likely tricked his co-pilot Fariq Hamid, who was on his final training flight, into leaving the cockpit.
He told The Atlantic: 'Zaharie was an examiner. All he had to say was 'Go check something in the cabin,' and the guy would have been gone.'
Grace Subathirai Nathan, daughter of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 passenger Anne Daisy, shows a piece of debris believed to be from flight MH370 during a press conference in Putrajaya on November 30, 2018
A graphic showing the flight path of the plane, and where it is thought to have disappeared
Why Zaharie would supposedly choose to crash the plane is still a mystery but his friend has pointed to his chaotic personal life and fragile emotional state as a possible explanation.
He said: 'Zaharie's marriage was bad. In the past he slept with some of the flight attendants. And so what? We all do. You're flying all over the world with these beautiful girls in the back. But his wife knew.'
The man added he thought Zaharie's emotional state may have been a factor in the incident.
As well as a turbulent personal life, Shah was very active on social media, often leaving messages on the profiles on twin models, and making a number of political statements critical of the government.
In the 12 months before the Boeing 777 went missing, Zaharie stalked the Facebook pages of Qi Min Lan and her twin Lan Qi Hui, 26, leaving sexually suggestive comments.
Qi Min Lan (pictured), one of the twins contacted by Shah, said police spoke to her about Zaharie after the plane went missing
Shah implored the twins to come to Kuala Lumpur, where he lived with his wife. In another, where Qi Min Lan posted a photo of herself in a bathrobe, he wrote: 'Just shower?'
Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah (pictured with meat and a cleaver) was the pilot-in-command when the plane carrying 238 other passengers and crew vanished in March 2014
Throughout 2013, the 53-year-old made 97 separate Facebook comments directed at Ms Lan. A vast majority of his messages were ignored.
Shah implored the twins to come to Kuala Lumpur, where he lived with his wife.
'When in KL,' he wrote in one message.
'How about KL?' he persisted, but got no reply.
In another, where Qi Min Lan posted a photo of herself in a bathrobe, he wrote: 'Just shower?'
On top of his obsessive messages to the girls, Shah frequently criticised the Malaysian government, which happens to own the airline he worked for.
On his own public Facebook page, Zaharie labeled then-Prime Minister Najib Razak a 'moron'.
In April 2013, leading up to the Malaysian elections, Zaharie posted 119 times, all in reflection of his disgust with the Naijb government.
The following month, after the Najib party secured another five-year term, Zaharie wrote: 'There is a rebel in each and every one of us. Let it out!'
WHAT HAPPENED TO MH370? SOME OF THE THEORIES INTO THE MYSTERY EXAMINED
Zaharie Ahmad Shah (pictured) was the pilot of the doomed flight
DID THE PILOT HIJACK HIS OWN PLANE?
Pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah planned mass murder because of personal problems, locking his co-pilot out of the cockpit, closing down all communications, depressurising the main cabin and then disabling the aircraft so that it continued flying on auto-pilot until it ran out of fuel.
That was the popular theory in the weeks after the plane's disappearance.
His personal problems, rumours in Kuala Lumpur said, included a split with his wife Fizah Khan, and his fury that a relative, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, had been given a five-year jail sentence for sodomy shortly before he boarded the plane for the flight to Beijing.
But the pilot's wife angrily denied any personal problems and other family members and his friends said he was a devoted family man and loved his job.
This theory was also the conclusion of the first independent study into the disaster by the New Zealand-based air accident investigator, Ewan Wilson.
Wilson, the founder of Kiwi Airlines and a commercial pilot himself, arrived at the shocking conclusion after considering 'every conceivable alternative scenario'.
However, he has not been able to provide any conclusive evidence to support his theory.
The claims are made in the book 'Goodnight Malaysian 370', which Wilson co-wrote with the New Zealand broadsheet journalist, Geoff Taylor.
It's also been rumoured that Zaharie used a flight simulator at his home to plot a path to a remote island.
However, officials in Kuala Lumpur declared that Malaysian police and the FBI's technical experts had found nothing to suggest he was planning to hijack the flight after closely examining his flight simulator.
And there are also theories that the tragic disappearance may have been a heroic act of sacrifice by the pilot.
Australian aviation enthusiast Michael Gilbert believes the doomed plane caught fire mid-flight, forcing the pilot to plot a course away from heavily populated areas.
IF NOT THE PILOT, WAS THE CO-PILOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MYSTERY?
Co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, again for personal problems, was suspected by rumour-spreaders to have overpowered the pilot and disabled the aircraft, flying it to its doom with crew and passengers unable to get through the locked cockpit door.
Theorists have put forward the suggestion that he was having relationship problems and this was his dramatic way of taking his own life.
But he was engaged to be married to Captain Nadira Ramli, 26, a fellow pilot from another airline, and loved his job. There are no known reasons for him to have taken any fatal action.
There have been a series of outlandish theories about the disappearance of the plane
Others have suggested that because he was known to have occasionally invited young women into the cockpit during a flight, he had done so this time and something had gone wrong.
Young Jonti Roos said in March that she spent an entire flight in 2011 in the cockpit being entertained by Hamid, who was smoking.
Interest in the co-pilot was renewed when it was revealed he was the last person to communicate from the cockpit after the communication system was cut off.
DID THE RUSSIANS STEAL MH370 AND FLY THE JET TO KAZAKHSTAN
An expert has claimed the missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 was hijacked on the orders of Vladimir Putin and secretly landed in Kazakhstan.
Jeff Wise, a U.S. science writer who spearheaded CNN's coverage of the Boeing 777-200E, has based his outlandish theory on pings that the plane gave off for seven hours after it went missing, that were recorded by British telecommunications company Inmarsat.
Wise believes that hijackers 'spoofed' the plane's navigation data to make it seem like it went in another direction, but flew it to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, which is leased from Kazakhstan by Russia.
However, Wise admits in New York Magazine that he does not know why Vladimir Putin would want to steal a plane full of people and that his idea is somewhat 'crazy'.
Wise also noted there were three Russian men onboard the flight, two of them Ukrainian passport holders.
Aviation disaster experts analysed satellite data and discovered - like the data recorded by Inmarsat - that the plane flew on for hours after losing contact.
Careful examination of the evidence has revealed that MH370 made three turns after the last radio call, first a turn to the left, then two more, taking the plane west, then south towards Antarctica.
MH370 WAS USED BY TERRORISTS FOR A SUICIDE ATTACK ON THE CHINESE NAVY
This extraordinary claim came from 41-year-old British yachtsman Katherine Tee, from Liverpool, whose initial account of seeing what she thought was a burning plane in the night sky made headlines around the world.
On arrival in Thailand's Phuket after sailing across the Indian Ocean from Cochin, southern India with her husband, she said: 'I could see the outline of the plane - it looked longer than planes usually do.There was what appeared to be black smoke streaming from behind.'
Ms Tee's general description of the time and place was vague and she lost all credibility when she later stated on her blog that she believed MH370 was a kamikaze plane that was aimed at a flotilla of Chinese ships and it was shot down before it could smash into the vessels.
Without solid proof of the satellite data, she wrote on her blog, Saucy Sailoress, the plane she saw was flying at low altitude towards the military convoy she and her husband had seen on recent nights. She added that internet research showed a Chinese flotilla was in the area at the time.
While the debris proved the plane went down in the Indian Ocean, the location of the main underwater wreckage — and its crucial black box data recorders — remains stubbornly elusive.
THE JET LANDED ON THE WATER AND WAS SEEN FLOATING ON THE ANDAMAN SEA
On a flight from Jeddah to Kuala Lumpur that crossed over the Andaman Sea on March 8, Malaysian woman Raja Dalelah, 53, saw what she believed was a plane sitting on the water's surface.
She didn't know about the search that had been started for MH370. She alerted a stewardess who told her to go back to sleep.
'I was shocked to see what looked like the tail and wing of an aircraft on the water,' she said.
It was only when she told her friends on landing in Kuala Lumpur what she had seen that she learned of the missing jet. She had seen the object at about 2.30pm Malaysian time.
She said she had been able to identify several ships and islands before noticing the silver object that she said was a plane.
But her story was laughed off by pilots who said it would have been impossible to have seen part of an aircraft in the water from 35,000ft or seven miles.
Ms Raja filed an official report with police the same day and has kept to her story.
'I know what I saw,' she said.
THE AIRCRAFT SUFFERED A CATASTROPHIC SYSTEMS FAILURE AND CRASH-LANDED ON THE OCEAN
A catastrophic event such as a fire disabling much of the equipment resulted in the pilots turning the plane back towards the Malaysian peninsula in the hope of landing at the nearest airport.
Satellite data, believable or not, suggests the aircraft did make a turn and theorists say there would be no reason for the pilots to change course unless confronted with an emergency.
A fire in a similar Boeing 777 jet parked at Cairo airport in 2011 was found to have been caused by a problem with the first officer's oxygen mask supply tubing.
Stewarts Law, which has litigated in a series of recent air disasters, believes the plane crashed after a fire - similar to the blaze on the Cairo airport runway - broke out in the cockpit.
After an investigation into the Cairo blaze, Egypt's Aircraft Accident Investigation Central Directorate (EAAICD) released their final report which revealed that the fire originated near the first officer's oxygen mask supply tubing.
The cause of the fire could not be conclusively determined, but investigators pinpointed a problem with the cockpit hose used to provide oxygen for the crew in the event of decompression.
Following the 2011 fire, US aircraft owners were instructed to replace the system - it was estimated to cost $2,596 (£1,573) per aircraft. It was not known whether Malaysia Airlines had carried out the change.
If either pilot wanted to crash the plane, why turn it around? So the turn-around suggests they were trying to land as soon as possible because of an emergency.
THE US SHOT DOWN THE AIRCRAFT FEARING A TERROR ATTACK ON DIEGO GARCIA
The Boeing 777 was shot down by the Americans who feared the aircraft had been hijacked and was about to be used to attack the U.S. military base on Diego Garcia atoll in the Indian Ocean. So conspiracy theorists claim.
And former French airline director Marc Dugain said he had been warned by British intelligence that he was taking risks by investigating this angle.
There is no way of checking whether Dugain received such a warning or why he believes the Americans shot down the plane.
But adding to the theory that the aircraft was flown to Diego Garcia, either by the pilot Zaharie or a hijacker, was the claim that on the pilot's home flight simulator was a 'practice' flight to the island.
Professor Glees said: 'The Americans would have no interest in doing anything of the kind and not telling the world.
'In theory, they might wish to shoot down a plane they thought was attacking them but they wouldn't just fire missiles, they'd investigate it first with fighters and would quickly realise that even if it had to be shot down, the world would need to know.'
Mr Rosenschein said: 'The U.S. would not have been able to hide this fact and in any event, if it were true, they would have admitted their action as it would have prevented a successful terrorist action on this occasion and acted as a deterrent for future terrorist attacks.'
