Warren Truss concedes MH370 rogue pilot theory possible

The government has moved closer to accepting that Malaysia Airlines Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah hijacked his own aircraft.

The federal government has moved closer to accepting that Malaysia Airlines captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah hijacked his own aircraft and brought down Flight MH370, after widespread criticism of Australian air safety investigators’ decision to exclude that scenario in deciding where to search.

The concession by Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss follows a series of articles published in The Australian and The Weekend Australian in which professional airline pilots and air safety investigators have said the “rogue pilot” theory was the most credible, and that to ignore this theory risked looking in the wrong area.

In correspondence with The Weekend Australian, Mr Truss said “it is difficult to conceive any scenario that does not include some element of human intervention” in the loss of MH370, which disappeared with 239 ­people on board during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which operates under Mr Truss’s transport ­portfolio, has fought a rearguard ­action over its decision to work on the “type” of scenario in which the pilots became unconscious because of loss of oxygen through decompression or became otherwise “unresponsive”, and considered only the last leg of the flight from Malaysia to the southern Indian Ocean.

Pilots and aviation experts say given the deliberate flying evident in the first part of the flight back over Malaysia and the turning off of the radar transponder and cut in communications, the most likely scenario is that Captain Zaharie deliberately took the aircraft to its end, possibly as a political statement.

In a recent ABC radio interview, ATSB chief Martin Dolan said the responsibility of working out what happened rested with Malaysian investigators, and the ATSB, which is merely guiding the search, did not need to change its strategy to base it on the scenario of the pilot flying the aircraft to the end.

“All the evidence we have at the moment says that is very ­unlikely,” he told the ABC.

But in correspondence, Mr Truss appeared to open the door to accepting the possibility.

“The Australian government has not adopted a position on the cause of the crash, but … I have always acknowledged that it is difficult to conceive any scenario that does not include some ­element of human intervention,” he wrote.

He also revealed Malaysia had paid $80 million towards the cost of the search.

As revealed by The Australian, the federal government body coordinating the search announced in July 2014 that a Malaysian survey vessel, which was identified as the KD Mutiara, would join the search for MH370, but that vessel never showed up.

Mr Truss said another vessel provided by Malaysia, the GO Phoenix, was “productively engaged” in the search.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government has announced it will ­finally rejoin the hunt for MH370, saying it will send a search vessel by the end of next month.