Pilot ‘could have flown MH370 for hours while passengers lay dead in cabin’

Air traffic expert Jean-Luc Marchand (left) and retired commercial pilot Patrick Blelly (right) used a Boeing simulator to try and solve the mystery of MH370

Missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was intentionally flown off course with passengers dead in the cabin, a commercial pilot believes.

Retired Air France pilot Patrick Blelly has been working for years to try and solve the mystery of what became of the commercial jet ten years ago.

‘My theory is the MH370 was depressurised,’ he said. ‘It is quite easy for a pilot to depressurise an aircraft. All you have to do is switch the pressurisation valves to manual.’

If the pilot did indeed override the automatic system to do this, emergency oxygen masks would have only allowed passengers to survive for around 20 minutes, meaning they would soon have been slumped unconscious and ‘neutralised’ with hypoxia.

Extra supplies and special masks in the cockpit, however, would have given the pilot enough for more than 20 hours: long enough to plot a vastly different flight path than its intended journey to Beijing.

At the same time as sucking out the oxygen, the pilot could have shut off power to on-board satellite phones, leaving crew with no way to contact the ground, in order to carry out a mass murder suicide of all 239 people on board.

Patrick thinks there is no way the plane could have crashed accidentally, and says it would have taken skill and tools to make it ‘disappear’ in such a way

Air traffic management expert Jean-Luc Marchand has worked with Patrick for four years to try and understand what happened on board the flight, using a Boeing flight simulator to recreate its last moments.

They both spoke to the BBC for a documentary ahead of the ten-year anniversary of the flight from Kuala Lumpur going missing on March 8 2014.

It comes amid fresh hope for families, with an aerospace engineer convinced he knows where it is, and seabed exploration firm Ocean Infinity offering to look again on a ‘no find no fee’ basis in hope of retrieving the fuselage and black boxes and finally finding definite answers.

Jean-Luc is also convinced that a skilled pilot must have actively taken the plane off course, pushing it to its limits with a steep U-turn where it should have crossed into Vietnamese airspace and veering across the Strait of Malacca instead.

‘How could such an aircraft disappear in such a controlled world?’ he asked. ‘He took care to be invisible, to not be followed.’

Contact with the plane was lost at a checkpoint called Igari. The pilot said goodbye to Malaysian air traffic control as expected, but never made contact again after that.

This graphic shows where parts of the plane picked up by ocean currents were later recovered (Picture: Metro.co.uk)

‘It is clever because the choice of area is really a black hole between Kuala Lumpur and Vietnam,’ Jean-Luc said. ‘If you want to disappear, this is where you do it.’

At first, where the plane went from here was a complete mystery as the transponders transmitting data on location to air traffic control radar also appear to have been manually turned off in the cockpit.

Satellites were eventually able to track where the plane went from here, but not for long.

They do prove it made an abrupt turn at the beginning, however, which would have been a challenging manouevre and unlikely to happen by accident.

‘It is demanding in the sense that the controls are shaking because you’re at the limit of the aircraft and the aircraft is telling you “You’re asking me a lot”,’ Jean-Luc said.

The lead pilot on board the flight was Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who had flown with the airline for around 30 years.

Before the flight went missing, Shah uploaded videos to his Youtube channel where he used a homemade flight simulator.

Zaharie Ahmad Shah, the lead pilot of Malaysian airlines Flight MH370

According to the BBC documentary, investigators found evidence of a deleted flight path on this simulator going from Kuala Lumpur to the south of the Indian Ocean, which is where the flight is thought to have finally crashed.

The previous search was limited by calculations on how far the plane might have been able to get before running out of fuel.

But if Patrick and Jean-Luc are correct, and a pilot remained actively flying the plane, it could have potentially kept gliding even after the fuel ran out.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has previously pushed back on this theory, saying that debris recovered indicates the plane was freefalling when it hit the sea and not under control of a pilot.

And even though Patrick believes he has found a coherent explanation for how the plane went off course, he added: ‘We don’t know why he did that. We have no idea why.’

‘BBC This World: Why Planes Vanish: The Hunt for MH370’ is currently available on iPlayer.

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