MH370 probe ‘ignored key evidence of hijacking by pilot’

One of the world’s leading air-crash investigators has produced evidence that a pilot on flight MH370 hijacked his own aircraft.

Malaysian and Australian investigators examine a piece of aircraft debris found on Pemba Island off the coast of Tanzania. Picture: AFP

One of the world’s leading air-crash investigators has produced compelling evidence that a pilot on Malaysia Airlines Fight MH370 hijacked his own aircraft and flew it to the end to perform a controlled ditching, contrary to the ­assumptions of the Australian investigators who led the first failed underwater search for the aircraft.

Canadian Larry Vance, a former commercial pilot who worked as a senior air-crash investigator with Canada’s Transportation Safety Board and who now runs his own consultancy, reveals the findings in a new book, MH370: Mystery Solved.

MH370 disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board, its radar transponder turned off and radio communications having ceased 40 minutes into the flight as it zigzagged over Malaysia then on a long track south.

The Australian today exclusively publishes the first extracts from Vance’s book, in which he says the Australian Transport Safety Bureau ignored clear evidence from parts of the aircraft found washed up on the other side of the Indian Ocean that MH370 did not come down in a high-speed, unpiloted crash as the ATSB maintains, but in a controlled landing on the ocean.

Vance bases his assertions on careful examination of high-­resolution photographs of the recovered flaperon and flap of MH370, which he claims prove conclusively they were lowered as a pilot would do for a ditching, a conclusion contrary to the ATSB’s contention they were ­retracted.

Vance, who was deputy lead investigator on the 1998 high-speed diving crash of airliner Swissair 111 off the Canadian coast that saw the aircraft explode when it hit the water through hydro­dynamic pressure into two million parts, asserts the flap and flaperon would not have been left mostly intact had MH370 come rapidly spiralling down as the ATSB maintains.

He also says damage to the trailing edges of the two parts is consistent only with a ditching.

Vance says the ATSB and its panel of international experts fastened on too early to their theory of incapacitated pilots and the aircraft flying on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and plummeted. He suggests they at least subconsciously resisted changing tack when the new wreckage evidence came to hand, sticking with their “ghost flight” and “death dive” theory even though a controlled ditching could have taken MH370 outside their defined search area.

“The turning point for the ATSB’s investigation, away from the unpiloted airplane theory and towards the deliberate act theory, should have come on 29 July, 2015, with the discovery of the flap­eron from the right wing of MH370,” Vance writes.

His work has been commended by one of the world’s most respected air-crash investigators, US former airline captain John Cox. “ATSB makes the statement that the flaps were retracted but provides little supporting evidence for that conclusion,” Captain Cox told The Aus tralian.

“On the contrary, Larry goes into detail of the evidence supporting the view that the flaps were not in the retracted position,” he said.

“This is important because extending the flaps requires a command from the pilot and there must be hydraulic power available to move the surfaces. Larry’s analysis is more compelling than ATSB’s published position.”

In an episode about MH370 on the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes last night, former ATSB chief commissioner Martin Dolan said: “I still think the weight of the evidence … is that, for whatever reason, it’s unlikely there were control inputs at the end of the flight, and the aircraft spiralled into the water and crashed.”

But he acknowledged it was possible that premise was wrong.

The ATSB officer who led the underwater search, Peter Foley, and the bureau’s media spokesman, Paul Sadler, did not respond to emails seeking comment.