KUALA LUMPUR, March 11 — A woman has come forward to allege that the co-pilot from missing MAS flight MH370 had allowed her and a friend stay in the cockpit for the entire duration of a flight from Phuket to Kuala Lumpur.
Speaking to Australian news programme A Current Affairs, Jooti Roos, a South African, also provided photographs of her in the cockpit of a plane together with Fariq Abdul Hamid and the unidentified captain of the flight, to support her claim.
“We were standing in line at the boarding gates with everybody else when the pilot and co-pilot walked past us, came back and asked us if we would like to sit with them in the cockpit during the flight, so obviously we said yes,” Roos said during the interview with ACA’s Elise Elliot.
Once aboard the flight, the Melbourne resident said she and her friend were brought into the cockpit, where an air hostess helped to lower the jumpseats for them.
Asked by Elliot if they were there during the critical moments of takeoff and landing, Roos replied: “Yes”.
“I was just completely shocked. I couldn’t believe it,” the woman added.
She also went on to describe the actions of the captain and Fariq, whom she alleged had asked her and her friend if they would be able to spend a few nights in Kuala Lumpur “so they could take us out.”
Roos appeared to suggest that the duo in charge of piloting the plane were more engrossed in them than on operating the aircraft itself.
“Throughout the flight they were talking to us, they were smoking, which I don’t think they are allowed to be doing, and they were taking photos with us while they were flying.
“I know for the whole time they weren’t actually facing the front of the plane, actually flying,” Roos recounted.
But she insisted that her allegations were not meant to imply that Fariq was to blame for the Malaysia Airlines flight that has now been missing for nearly four days with 239 people onboard.
Instead, Roos said she was shocked to see Fariq’s name among the list of those on the missing plane as she remembered the time she spent with him on the previous flight.
Since the hijacking of planes for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, most airlines bar passengers from entering the cockpit, while plane makers have also reinforced the doors leading to the control area to prevent forced entry.
ACA said a MAS spokesman denied the airline allowed passengers into the critical area, especially not during takeoff and landings.
Flight MH370 departed Kuala Lumpur International Airport for Beijing shortly after midnight on March 8, before vanishing mid-air.
It is now the subject of a massive search and rescue operations using the assets of 10 countries.
* A previous version of this article erroneously stated 2011 as the year of the September 11 attacks, when it was in fact 2001 and that Jooti Roos was an Australian. The article has since been corrected.
