MH370 report a disservice to Australian victims

A Malaysian man walks in front of a mural of missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 plane in a back-alley in Shah Alam.

The MH370 report by the Malaysian government is out, and as ­expected it is a whitewash.

It reaches no conclusion.

Soon after MH370 dis­appeared, the Malaysian PM said it was a deliberate case of human intervention and his wife remarked to the wife of a missing Australian passenger how “horrible that someone could do this”.

Strange, therefore, that the ATSB decided on an event that rendered the pilots unconscious and the plane flying by itself for another seven hours and crashing uncontrolled into the southern Indian Ocean.

Any airline pilot with half a brain could have told them MH370 would have flown itself to the programmed destination of Beijing unless someone with considerable flight deck expertise reprogrammed flight management system computers.

The ATSB’s ­report stated: “There was no evidence to suggest the aircraft was flown under control.” What nonsense. All the evidence — lots of it — practically screams that the aircraft was under pilot control.

Their statement then morphs into “all the evidence points to the pilots being unresponsive”.

What evidence?

Flight officer Rayan Gharazeddine scans the water in the southern Indian Ocean off Australia from a Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion during a search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

The wilful ignorance of the government that allowed the ATSB to conduct this farce over the past four years stands as a monument to political correctness.

They have enabled Malaysia to avoid the political and liability ­issues that should have ensued.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop is rightly pushing hard for Russia to be accountable for the MH17 shoot-down but what about MH370? MH17 was a result of a cowboy act by the Russian military in a war zone that misidentified MH17 as an IL76 military freighter.

MH370 was a cold-blooded murder that included Australians. Since our government is too timid, the matter should be referred to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

I’m not surprised that many aviation experts consider the ATSB deliberately avoided search­ing in the aviation expert-­defined small area so as to not find MH370, and that it was a cover-up.

Byron Bailey is a former RAAF pilot and former captain for Emirates Airlines who flew B777s.