KUALA LUMPUR, March 6 — The most plausible explanation for the disappearance of Flight MH370 is the Malaysia Airlines (MAS) pilot or co-pilot going rogue, experts and investigators have said.
US paper the New York Times (NYT) also reported yesterday Flight MH370 Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s old friend, Nik Huzlan, as saying that it was likely someone in the cockpit, who had deliberately diverted the plane during its flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8 last year, shut down the jet’s communications systems and flown on for six hours until the aircraft ran out of fuel and crashed in the ocean, killing all 239 people on board.
“Based on logic, when you throw emotion away, it seems to point in a certain direction which you can’t ignore. Your best friend can harbour the darkest secrets,” retired MAS chief pilot Huzlan was quoted saying.
He reportedly said, however, that he has never seen anything in more than his three decades of friendship with Zaharie that would suggest the pilot was capable of doing such a thing.
The NYT said the “rogue pilot theory” was the likeliest explanation for one of the world’s biggest aviation mysteries where the commercial plane seemingly vanished into thin air, with a current underwater search scouring a 60,000 square kilometre section of the southern Indian Ocean off West Australia yet to reveal any wreckage.
The paper reported that many, though not all, of the experts and investigators who have reviewed the scant evidence say that Zaharie, or co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, is the most probable culprit, though they point out that the evidence is circumstantial and a motive has yet to be established.
“I would say that’s my favourite, because it would fit best with what has happened,” long-time Australian airline executive Peter Marosszeky was quoted as saying.
The NYT quoted unnamed people with detailed knowledge of the investigation as saying that psychological profiles of Zaharie prepared after the plane’s disappearance do not indicate that the pilot could have brought the jet down or would have had a good reason for doing so.
Australian Transport Minister Warren Truss said recently that Malaysia, Australia and Indonesia would test a new flight-tracking method that will enable airlines to know the position of their jets every 15 minutes, instead of the previous rate of 30 to 40 minutes.
The NYT reported that airlines and the International Civil Aviation Organisation, the United Nations’ aviation arm, have agreed that a more frequent flight-tracking system should be in place by November 2016.
