“The final report into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 suggests that it was most likely hijacked.
The long awaited 1,500-page report released by the Malaysian government today concludes that the Beijing-bound aircraft’s sudden course reversal shortly after it took off from Kuala Lumpur was “difficult to attribute” to a system failure.
It does not, however, offer a definitive explanation for the aircraft’s disappearance, which took the lives of 239 passengers and crew.
“It is more likely that such manoeuvres are due to the systems being manipulated,” the official air accident report by Malaysian, Australian, US, UK and Chinese aviation experts said. They concluded that when MH370 turned south off its northeasterly flight path to Beijing only 37 minutes after taking off on March 8, 2014, it was being flown manually, not by autopilot.
Dr Kok Soo Chon, the Malaysian government’s appointed head of the international investigation team, told reporters that investigators “have finally reached a consensus” about the flight’s last hours.
“We have carried out simulator sessions to determine how the aircraft turned back and we can confirm that the turn-back was made, not under autopilot, but under manual control.
“[It] was not because of anomalies in the mechanical system,” he said.
However, he said they had been unable to establish if anybody other than Zaharie Ahmad Shah, a senior captain with Malaysian Airlines, and co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid — the two flight crew assigned to MH370 — might have been at the controls.
“We can also not exclude the possibility that there’s unlawful interference by a third party,” Dr Chon said.
Based on satellite tracking of automated signals from MH370, the aircraft is known to have flown south from Malaysia, past western Australia, and continued over the southern Indian Ocean before it ran out of fuel and plummeted into the sea.
Although around 15 items of wreckage confirmed to be from the aircraft — including a large wing component — have since washed up around Indian Ocean island and African coasts, the aircraft has never been found, despite two mammoth underwater searches.
The investigation found nothing in the background of either pilot to suggest stress caused by personal or professional issues. Investigators even compared CCTV footage of the pair checking in for the doomed flight with footage of them arriving for previous flights but could find no differences in mannerisms or behaviours.
The report, despite finding a pilot was in control when the plane reversed course, rejects the view of many aviators and exports that MH370 was deliberately trying to avoid radar surveillance when it made a series of turns that took it south, instead of north, soon after take-off.
Yet it does not exclude the possibility that there was a deliberate decision by whoever was in command of the aircraft to evade communications with air traffic controllers who noticed the plane deviate off course.
“It is possible that the absence of communications prior to flight path diversion was due to the systems being manually turned off, whether with intent or otherwise,” Dr Chon said.
The report also rejected previous theories that Captain Zaharie had used his home computer flight simulator in the weeks before MH 370’s disappearance to replicate its route south. It said activity files recovered from the flight simulator reflected normal “game” use.
It also supports the theory that by the time the plane exhausted its fuel — six hours after taking off — and crashed, nobody was in control, seeking to make a controlled ditching.
Family members of those on board the plane said they were frustrated as there were many gaps in the investigations and questions left unanswered.
Some relatives looked distraught after receiving the report, many sobbing and saying that the document offered them “no closure”.
Grace Nathan, a lawyer whose mother was on the flight, responded to the release of the report on Facebook. “Just because they call it a final report doesn’t mean it’s over for the next of kin,” she wrote today. “The search must go on. There can be no final report until MH370 is found.””
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