Australian team ready to conclude that pilots at the controls downed the aircraft if no sign of the wreckage is found within 10 weeks.
PETALING JAYA: If no sign of the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is found in 10 weeks’ time, when its international search is called off for good, the Australian probe team is ready to conclude that one or both pilots deliberately downed the aircraft on March 8, 2014 killing all 239 passengers.
Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), carrying out the search, said if they still came up empty-handed, it would be necessary to explain to the various governments what likely took place that fateful day.
“…despite all the evidence as we currently have, the possibility that someone was at the controls of that aircraft on the flight and gliding it becomes a more significant possibility, if we eliminate all of the current search area,” Express UK quoted Dolan as saying.
The rogue pilot theory suggests that somebody at the aircraft’s controls likely glided the aircraft for up to a hundred miles once fuel ran out, and if this were true, the area covered would be three times the size of the current search zone, already measuring a staggering a 46,000-square mile area of the Indian ocean off Australia’s west coast.
The team is also not discounting that a third individual entered the cockpit and took over the controls.
The rogue pilot theory was revisited after another theory, the “ghost flight” theory proved unlikely. Under this theory, it is believed that once MH370 ran out of fuel in mid-air, it would have entered a spiralling high-speed dive before crashing into the ocean, in which case, the wreckage would have been found by now within the area being searched.
However if there was someone at the controls, they would have been able to pilot the plane for some time and glide it for longer on the water, thereby expanding the search area considerably before the aircraft eventually sunk.
The search for MH370 has already cost a total of £90million, borne mostly by the governments of Malaysia and Australia with a smaller contribution from China.
Apart from the rogue pilot and ghost flight theories, others have included an electrical fault or decompression of the cabin as well as government conspiracies.
-FMT NEWS-
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