The pilot of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which went missing in 2014, ‘planned’ the doomed plane’s flight path to avoid leaving clues about its destination.
That’s the claim made by aeronautic engineer Richard Godfrey, based on research using data from Weak Signal Propagation (WSPR), a global radio system which tracks and detects planes as they cross signals by setting off ‘electronic trip wires’.
In his report, Godfrey says that the pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who was reportedly clinically depressed, deliberately changed direction and speed to leave ‘false trails’.
‘In case the aircraft was detected, the pilot also avoided giving a clear idea where he was heading by using a fight path with a number of changes of direction,’ Godfrey writes.
‘The flight path seems well planned and avoids commercial flight routes. The pilot appears not so concerned about fuel usage and much more concerned about leaving false trails.’
The Boeing 777 vanished from radar screens as it was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8 2014, resulting in the loss of all 239 people on board. Despite a four-year, $200mn international search effort, the vast majority of its wreckage has never been found.
According to The Atlantic, friends of Shah claim he was ‘lonely and sad’ and was believed to be ‘clinically depressed’.
But Shah ‘hijacking’ the plane and committing murder-suicide is just one of many theories about what happened.
Others include catastrophic systems failure; that Shah heroically sacrificed the burning plane, steering it away from populated areas to prevent greater loss of life; that the co-pilot brought a young woman into the cockpit and this somehow caused things to go wrong; that Russians hijacked the plane and took it to Kazakhstan (obviously); and that it was used as a kamikaze plane aimed at Chinese naval ships, but was shot down before hitting its target (even more obviously).
The search, however, does not continue... for now
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