An expert has claimed that the pilot in charge of the doomed Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have deliberately buried the plane in a sea trench so it was never found.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared over the South China Sea on March 8, 2014, and has never been found, with only minimal parts of the wreckage ever recovered in the 10 years since the tragedy.
The Boeing 777 vanished 39 minutes after it left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 passengers and crew members on board, with the reason for its disappearance remaining a mystery.
Expert Simon Hardy, a British pilot who was brought on board by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau in 2015 to help find the missing plane, revealed he believes the pilot had planned to kill everyone on board by perfectly ditching the aircraft in a part of the ocean where it would never be found.
Hardy told The Sun that he believed that the 53-year-old pilot of the doomed flight, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, aimed to bury the plane in the Geelvinck Fracture Zone, a trench running hundreds of miles under the southern Indian Ocean, killing himself and everyone on board.
While Hardy was unable to prove his theory before the search was called off in 2017, the FBI came to a similar conclusion during the initial investigation.
The area where he believes the plane went down, based on using the best flight simulators in the world to pinpoint its location, is earthquake-prone and would make it almost impossible for the aircraft to be found.
He told the outlet: "If you did manage to get [the plane] in there, you might find you get it buried after a few years by rocks, so it might even be at the bottom of the sea, covered."
Part of the reason Hardy believes Shah planned to down the plane is that he had requested additional fuel and extra oxygen for the cockpit but not the carbon before taking off, as well as the fact there was barely any debris and unusual satellite signs, known as "handshakes."
The extra fuel and oxygen would have allowed Shah to fly the plane without being detected for an additional seven hours, reaching the middle of nowhere, with the passengers and the rest of the crew falling unconscious before he ditched it into the ocean, according to Hardy.
He explained: "Imagine Miracle on the Hudson but everyone is already dead. Nobody gets out and it sinks to the bottom of the Southern Indian Ocean.
"Where does all the wreckage go? Well, there isn’t any, that’s why we’ve been deprived of wreckage."
Only a small number of parts of the missing plane have ever been recovered, with a part of the wing known as a flaperon washing up on the island of Reunion, about 425 miles west of Madagascar.
French experts who analyzed the piece day that the flaperon had been in a downward position, which also helps to back up the theory it was intentional.
Hardy added: "If the flaps were down … then someone is moving a lever and it’s someone who knows what they are doing. It all points to the same scenario."
Shah had also reportedly run a number of flights on an at-home simulator in which the plane would run out of fuel over the Southern Indian Ocean.
He was also an expert pilot with over 20 years of experience flying Boeing 777 passenger planes around the world and was a flight instructor training in the world's best simulators.
Hardy also believes that Shah worked out exactly how much fuel he would need to be able to ditch the plane without leaving a huge, tell-tale oil slick on the surface of the ocean if there was too much on board when it went down.
"If you're of a motive to make it disappear then only one solution is to ditch it as neatly as possible, so it sinks to the bottom with all the people inside, with all the flotation devices inside, with no baggage.
"That's what you want, if you want to make it disappear, you don't crash it you ditch it."
