US investigator says MH370 pilot ‘likely ditched jet’ as push for new search begins

A private underwater survey company has made an audacious bid to launch a new hunt for the MH370.

The leaders of the failed Australian government-led search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 have briefed staff of the private underwater survey company Ocean Infinity, which has made an audacious bid to launch a new hunt for the aircraft.

The move comes as one of the world’s top air crash investigators, US-based John Cox, has joined other international investigators and senior airline captains in saying the central assumption behind the Australian Transport Safety Bureau strategy for the first search was probably wrong.

Rather than the ATSB’s ­assumption of a “ghost flight” of incapacitated pilots and the aircraft crashing down rapidly after fuel exhaustion, Captain Cox said evidence from recovered wing flaps suggests the more likely scenario is that a pilot flew the aircraft to the end and ditched it.

At a two-day meeting in London early this week, officers of the CSIRO, the ATSB and other bodies involved in the original search briefed Ocean Infinity staff.

The move indicates Ocean Infinity is confident its in-principle contract with the Malaysian ­government to search for MH370 on a “no find, no fee” basis will go ahead, enabling the search to start in a matter of weeks. “We only talked about where they would search,” David Griffin, a CSIRO drift modelling expert, told The Weekend Australian.

ATSB spokesman Paul Sadler referred questions to the federal government’s Joint Agency ­Co-ordination Centre, which in turn ­referred inquiries to the ­Malaysian government.

Dr Griffin said “key people from the Australian investigation were all represented”.

MH370 disappeared on a scheduled flight from Kuala ­Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 passengers and crew on board. While the Boeing 777’s secondary radar transponder was turned off and radio contact terminated about 40 minutes into the flight, primary radar and automatic satellite tracking data ­suggest it doubled back over ­Malaysia before turning on a long track to the southern Indian Ocean.

The two year ATSB-led search of 120,000sq km ended in January with no trace of the plane, at a cost of $200 million to Australian, Malaysian and Chinese taxpayers.

Ocean Infinity, which is headquartered in Houston, Texas, but has offices in other parts of the world, a few months ago put an offer to Malaysia that it would search for MH370 but receive an agreed payment of up to $90m only ­if it found the wreckage.

It will send a vessel with ­advanced sonar scanning equipment to survey a 25,000sq km area to the north of the last search zone, identified by the ATSB and its fellow agencies as particularly promising based on new analysis of the satellite data and drift ­modelling of several parts of the aircraft found washed up on and off the coast of Africa.

Several aviation experts ­including Canadian air crash ­investigator Larry Vance have said the ATSB’s “ghost flight” and “death dive” theories are wrong, because the pattern of damage to the trailing edge of the mostly ­intact flap and flaperon indicates they were lowered by a pilot to slow the plane for a ditching.

Captain Cox has reviewed Mr Vance’s work, and said: “Based on that analysis I think it is likely, possibly highly likely, that there was at attempt to ditch the ­airplane.”

Neither Mr Sadler nor the JACC would say whether their ­officials still supported their original theory of a pilotless crash.