MH370 under control of pilot when it crashed: search co-ordinator

The Australian official co-ordinating the search for missing ­Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has admitted for the first time that damage found to recovered wreckage suggests the plane was under the control of a pilot when it crashed into the ocean.



Peter Foley, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s program director of the operational search for MH370, has conceded severe erosion along the trailing edge of two recovered wing parts points to a controlled landing into the ocean. This is a sig­nificant ­admission because such a scenario is at odds with the preferred theory held by crash investigators that the jet was not under pilot control at the end of its journey.

His admission gives weight to the theory that a rogue pilot deliberately crashed the plane and ­raises further doubts over ­whether MH370 is within the search area.

Mr Foley was asked on 60 Minutes last night: “If there was a rogue pilot, isn’t it possible that the plane was taken outside the parameters of the search area?”

Mr Foley answered: “Yeah — if you guided the plane or indeed control-ditched the plane, it has an extended range, potentially.”

Larry Vance, one of the world’s most ­experienced air crash investigators and former chief ­investigator for the Canadian Transportation Safety Board, told the program he was confident the Malaysian jet was being piloted at the end of its flight.

Mr Vance, who wrote the ­investigation report into the 1998 SwissAir 111 crash into the ocean near Nova Scotia, based his analysis in part on damage that is clearly visible along the trailing edge of MH370’s flaperon that was recovered from the French territory of Reunion Island off Madagascar a year ago.

“Somebody was flying the aeroplane at the end of its flight,’’ he said. “Somebody was flying the aeroplane into the water ... There is no other alternate theory that you can follow of all the potentials that might have happened. There’s no other theory that fits.”

Mr Vance said photographs and video of the flaperon, and more recent pictures of the wing flap found on the coast of Tanz­ania just over a month ago, show conclusive evidence of high-­pressure water erosion that cut a jagged edge along the trailing edge of both wing parts as they hit the water during a controlled landing by a pilot.

“The momentum of dragging that little flaperon through the water would be absolutely enormous,” he said.

“The force of the water is really the only thing that could make that jagged edge that we see. It wasn’t broken off. If it was broken off, it would be a clean break. You couldn’t even break that thing. I know from experience that it’s wide. If you wanted to break that off, you couldn’t do it and make it look like that.”

A critically important aspect, according to Mr Vance’s analysis, is that the evidence shows the wing flap and flaperon were extended for landing when the jet hit the ocean, and the only way they could have been extended is if a pilot manually selected them to be extended just before the aircraft went into the water.

“You cannot get the flaperon to extend any other way than if somebody extended it,” he said.

“Somebody would have to ­select it.”

Moreover, he said several course changes made earlier in the journey, including the U-turn back to Malaysia from the South China Sea, another course change along the Malay Peninsula and then another around the northern tip of Sumatra into the Indian Ocean, could have been made only if a pilot had entered co-­ordinates into the jet’s flight management computer.

Mr Foley, the ATSB’s surface safety investigation general manager, conceded this was correct: “There is a possibility … somebody (was) in control at the end and we are actively looking for evidence to support that,’’ he said.

But as recently as Friday ATSB commissioner Greg Hood reiterated the view of the search team that satellite data from the Boeing 777 jet suggested it was plunging at almost 400km/h just before it crashed into the sea with 239 passengers and crew.

He also said this meant no one was in control of the jet. Based on that satellite data, the Defence Science and Technology Group’s modelling has placed the jet as being “most likely” inside an area of 120,000sq km.

As Mr Foley now admits, however, such an analysis depends on the assumption the flight was uncontrolled after the jet ran out of fuel. A pilot could easily have ­glided or flown the plane well ­outside the current search area. Two senior 777 pilots also told 60 Minutes that the flap and flap­eron could have been extended only if the aircraft had at least one engine running, raising further doubts about the MH370 search team’s analysis, concluding that the jet must have run out of fuel before it descended at high speed into the ocean.

Malaysian police last week strongly denied the existence of any report showing the jet’s captain, Zahari Ahmed Shah, had plotted a route deep into the southern Indian Ocean on his home flight simulator, and that he later deleted this evidence off his computer, but 60 Minutes obtained a copy of that confidential Malaysian report. Mr Foley conceded the report was genuine.

Mr Hood had reportedly said it was an “FBI report” but more ­recent reports attribute its authorship to the Malaysian police. The report is not firm evidence of Captain Zahari’s culpability for the loss of MH370 but it does raise a disturbing suspicion, especially since the route he planned in his flight simulator clearly contemplated the jet would have run out of fuel over the Indian Ocean.

Malaysia’s decision to deny existence of this report has only fuelled concerns it is attempting to cover up pilot complicity in the loss of MH370.

In an astonishing admission, Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai also said Malaysia had still not taken possession of or examined the key flaperon evidence, even though it was recovered by French authorities more than a year ago on Reunion Island.

“We are unable to get the ­details from the French government,” he admitted.

Sources have said this was likely because French judicial investigators did not trust Malaysia to fairly investigate the growing evidence that the jet was downed by a rogue pilot, even though Malaysia has the power under international conventions to demand access.

Mr Vance also said the lack of any debris from inside the missing jet strongly suggested the aircraft hit the sea at a much slower speed than the search team’s satellite analysis suggested. He said when SwissAir 111 crashed into the sea off Nova Scotia, the plane exploded into two million small pieces, many floating for weeks, but there was no evidence of such a high-speed crash with MH370.

“I think the reason we don’t see debris from inside the aeroplane washing up in different places around the ocean is because that debris remained in the fuselage and the fuselage went to the bottom,” he said.

Danica Weeks, the wife of Paul Weeks, one of the missing passengers on board MH370, told 60 Minutes about a conversation she had with the Malaysian Prime Minister’s wife, Rosmah Mansor, that left her convinced the Malaysians know more than they have publicly acknowledged.

A month after the tragedy, she met Mrs Mansor at an air base in Perth. “She told me it was very horrible that somebody would do this to 238 innocent people. She was insinuating the pilot took the plane,” she said.

(culled from www.theaustralian.com.au)