There are now ongoing assumptions that the reason why the wreckage of the ill-fated Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 is very difficult to find is because the plane pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, plotted the suicide flight to the Indian Ocean.
The media was able to get their hands on a confidential document very recently which indicated that pilot Shah could have premeditated the tragedy.
According to the document, the pilot of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 used a home-built flight simulator where he reportedly practiced a suicide route to the Indian Ocean. Interestingly, his rehearsed suicide route is the same as the flight path taken by the plane on its way to its doom in the Indian Ocean on March 8, 2014, reports the International Business Times of UK.
The document comes from a Malaysian police investigation which conducted the probe on the whereabouts of the pilot following the accident. It was eventually turned over to the FBI.
It was eventually obtained by New York magazine based on the forensic analysis of the five hard disk drives seized from Shah’s home-built flight simulator. A critical information on one of the disk drives showed that Shah practiced the suicide route leading to a remote area in the southern Indian Ocean less than a month before the actual flight.
The Malaysian government has apparently withheld the information from the investigation report and only released it during the first anniversary of the disappearance of Flight MH370 in March last year.
A primary suspect in the case
Following the accident, Shah has been considered a primary suspect in the case but there was no evidence to implicate him.
In fact, the factual information sheet released immediately after the disappearance of Flight MH370 said that the Captain has very good ability to handle stress at work and at home. He has no known history of apathy, anxiety, or irritability.
The investigation also revealed that there were no significant changes in his lifestyle, interpersonal conflict or family stresses.
But the report also cited that the Australian and US officials involved in the investigation of the Flight MH370 were more suspicious of Shah than their Malaysian counterparts.
With the recent release of a confidential document on the initial investigation, it seems that it shall alter the perception of people on the extent of involvement of Shah on the mysterious disappearance of the ill-fated plane.
Planning the flight
Malaysia turned over to the FBI the hard drives that Zaharie used to record sessions on an elaborate home-built flight simulator.
Based on the six deleted data points recovered by the FBI from the Microsoft Flight Simulator X program in the weeks before the plane went missing, it also contains the simulated airplane’s altitude, speed, the direction of flight, and key parameters at a given point in time, details the New York magazine.
The deleted data points also showed a flight departing from Kuala Lumpur and then headed northwest over the Malacca Strait, then turned left and headed south over the Indian Ocean continuing on the same stretch of the sea until fuel exhaustion.
Investigation officials believe that Flight MH370 followed a similar route, based on signals the plane transmitted to a satellite after ceasing communications and veering off course.
But the actual and the simulated flights were not identical, though, with the simulated endpoint some 900 miles from the remote patch of southern ocean area where officials believe the plane went down
The newly released document, however, suggest Malaysian officials have suppressed at least one key piece of incriminating information. This is not entirely surprising: There is a history in aircraft investigations of national safety boards refusing to believe that their pilots could have intentionally crashed an aircraft full of passengers.
After Egypt Air 990 went down near Martha’s Vineyard in 1999, Egyptian officials angrily rejected the US National Transport Safety Board finding that the pilot had deliberately steered the plane into the sea. Indonesian officials likewise rejected the NTSB finding that the 1997 crash of Silk Air 185 was an act of pilot suicide.
However, it’s not entirely clear that the recovered flight-simulator data is conclusive. The differences between the simulated and actual flights are significant, most notably in the final direction in which they were heading.