We got it wrong, says ex-MH370 search head Martin Dolan

Martin Dolan says independent aviation experts who promoted the rogue-pilot-to-the-end conclusion early on may be right after all.

The senior public servant in charge of the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has admitted the $200m hunt may have failed because he refused to accept the captain hijacked his own aircraft and flew it to the end.

Martin Dolan, former chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, has conceded in a documentary that new evidence increasingly points to the ATSB’s theory that MH370 was unpiloted at the end being wrong.

Then transport minister Warren Truss also admits in the Sky News special MH370: The Untold Story, airing on Wednesday and Thursday nights, that the ATSB was “looking in the wrong place” in trying to find the Boeing 777 and the 239 people on board.

Mr Dolan says independent aviation experts such as veteran pilot Byron Bailey, whom the government dismissed when he promoted the rogue-pilot-to-the-end conclusion early in the search, may be right after all. He says a rogue pilot may have depressurised the aircraft to kill the passengers and crew through oxygen deprivation, while he alone in the cockpit had a much longer oxygen supply.

New evidence and analysis, such as the pattern of damage on wing parts of the aircraft found washed up on the other side of the Indian Ocean that independent experts say show the aircraft was deliberately ditched, appear to have changed Mr Dolan’s mind.

“We just now have some additional information which has been brought to bear … that means there’s an increasing likelihood that there was someone at the controls at the end of flight,” Mr Dolan says.

The admissions mark an about-face for Mr Dolan, who during the two-year search for MH370 after its disappearance in 2014 repeatedly said suggestions Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah flew it to a controlled ditching were “very unlikely”.

In the documentary, Mr Dolan says of Mr Bailey’s scenario: “He might be right — I don’t disagree with any of the basic ­assumptions that Byron has.”

As revealed by The Australian on Tuesday, then prime minister Tony Abbott says in the documentary he had known within days that the pilot had hijacked his own aircraft in an act of mass murder-suicide because senior Malaysian officials had told him the evidence pointed that way.

MH370 disappeared 40 minutes into a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. A play-back of military radar and automatic satellite handshake data revealed it flew a zig-zag course back over Malaysia and up the Straits of Malacca before turning on a long track to the southern Indian Ocean, its secondary radar transponder turned off and radio contact broken.

The ATSB based its two-year search on the assumption that by the end, MH370 was a ghost flight with “unresponsive” pilots, crashing after running out of fuel while flying on autopilot.

ATSB spokesman Paul Sadler did not respond to questions asking whether the bureau had changed its mind on its “ghost flight/death dive” theory.

MH370: The Untold Story concludes at 8pm tonight on Sky News. Senior journalist on The Australian Ean Higgins, author of The Hunt for MH370, spent years investigating the mystery and worked with the Sky News team on the documentary.

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