Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was at the controls when MH370 left Malaysia and went off course (Picture: Christopher Bayle, Metro.co.uk/EPA/Pixabay/YouTube)
He is the experienced pilot who remains at the centre of one of the aviation world’s biggest and most enduring mysteries.
Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was in charge as MH370 lost contact with air traffic controllers during the flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing.
Ten years on, there are still no answers as to how an aircraft bristling with technology ‘went dark’ with 239 passengers and crew on board.
However, theories that the respected aviator may have been behind the disappearance of the Boeing 777 have persisted over the years.
The then Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, said a week after the jet vanished that its last known movements were ‘consistent with the deliberate actions of someone on the plane’.
To date, official investigators in the country have not identified any one party as responsible.
But it’s widely thought that the Malaysian Airlines plane was manually diverted to put it on a different course towards a remote and vast expanse of the Indian Ocean.
Some commentators believe that the 53-year-old, who is said to have had a complicated private life, took everyone on board with him in a carefully planned act of suicide.
MH370 pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah is at the centre of the mystery about what happened to the jet (Picture: Eyepress News/Sipa/Shutterstock)
British aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey and MH370 wreckage hunter Blaine Gibson have carried out extensive research which they say shows that there was an ‘active pilot’ until the end of the flight.
However they have said the debris cannot ‘tell us who was flying the aircraft or why’. So it remains open to speculation as to whether the father-of-three carried out a murder-suicide, or even if he was in control of the aircraft as it deviated from the flight plan on March 8, 2014.
The last contact between the crew of MH370 and air traffic controllers took place as it transitioned from Malaysian to Vietnamese airspace over the Gulf of Thailand, 38 minutes after takeoff.
At 1.19am Malaysian time either the captain or first officer Fariq Abdul said what turned out to be the final words from the cockpit: ‘Goodnight Malaysian three seven zero.’
The aircraft’s transponder and radar tracking then went offline.
Instead of continuing north towards Beijing, the aircraft turned south-west, with the evidence from Godfrey, Gibson and the Malaysian authorities indicating that it crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.
The flight path of MH370 as it went off course and the location of debris
A range of theories has been put forward as to why the aircraft disappeared, including a hijacking or the plane being shot down by the US military.
The largest search in aviation history, involving teams from a number of different nations, has failed to yield a definitive answer.
Aircraft debris — including a wing section called a flaperon — has washed up on Réunion Island near Mauritius, around 3,500 miles from Malaysia.
French investigators confirmed in 2015 that the fragment matches records held by a Boeing subcontractor who made the part fitted to MH370.
But no black box has been found and doubt over whether the debris even belongs to MH370 has been raised by French investigative journalist Florence de Changy, who has speculated that the aircraft was shot down by the US military.
Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was an experienced aviator who Malaysian authorities said was not showing signs of stress (Picture: file image)
Godfrey’s reports, by contrast, give first-hand descriptions of MH370 wreckage and state that 43 pieces of floating debris have been found and passed to the Malaysian authorities for investigation.
He found that close inspection of the damaged fragments showed ‘the end of the flight was in a high-speed dive designed to ensure the aircraft broke up into as many pieces as possible’.
In the update last December, Godfrey continues: ‘The combination of high-speed impact and possible extension of the landing gear show a clear intent to hide the evidence of the crash.’
Zaharie had 18,000 hours of flying time, but it’s been suggested there is more to his background than has been given in Malaysia’s official reports.
In 2019, American aviation writer William Langewiesche set out his view that the pilot was responsible, with the Malaysian government not being fully transparent about his background.
The Boeing 777 flies over Poland a month before it went missing on a flight between Malaysia and China (Picture: Reuters)
Langewiesche’s report cited friends of Zaharie’s, who was known by his first name, saying he was ‘often lonely and sad’ after the dissolution of his marriage and his children moving out of the house.
He had been in a ‘wistful’ relationship with a married woman and to have ‘obsessed’ over two internet models, according to the professional pilot.
‘There is a strong suspicion among investigators in the aviation and intelligence communities that he was clinically depressed,’ Langewiesche wrote of Zaharie for his report in The Atlantic.
Speaking to Langewiesche, a lifelong friend of the captain told of coming to the conclusion that the aviator was responsible.
The unnamed person said: ‘It doesn’t make sense. It’s hard to reconcile with the man I knew. But it’s the necessary conclusion.’
Under Langewiesche’s most likely scenario, Zaharie used his own oxygen supply after somehow removing his co-pilot from the equation and depressuring the aeroplane which, together with a steep climb, would have rendered unconscious and then slowly killed all on board.
Officers carry pieces of debris from an aircraft washed ashore on Réunion island in 2015 (Picture: EPA)
Another piece of circumstantial evidence pointing towards his involvement is a flight simulator found at his home, showing he had mapped out a similar route to the one recorded by radar and satellite data.
This version of events might explain why so little concrete evidence has been found in the last decade, even in a digital age and after one of the biggest and most expensive air-sea searches in history.
In this scenario, Zaharie’s plan to go out of sight continues.
In 2018, Malaysian authorities published a 1,500-page investigative report into the disappearance which concluded that the captain and co-pilot were well-rested and not under apparent financial or psychological stress.
They also found the simulator did not show a ‘similar route’ to the one flown by MH370 with the activity being ‘game related’.
Relatives of passengers on MH370 are keeping the search for answers in the public eye (Picture: Supian Ahmad/NurPhoto/Shutterstock)
But the investigation team could not determine the reason why the plane diverted from its planned route and effectively disappeared.
The families of those on board now want a fresh search of an expanse of the southern Indian Ocean by US robotics firm Ocean Infinity.
Key to finally unlocking the mystery will be retrieving the black box, the aircraft’s flight data and cockpit voice recorder.
But until the Malaysian authorities sign off the new hunt and the crucial evidence is found, Zaharie will continue to be at the centre of one of the aviation world’s most stubborn mysteries.
MORE : MH370 pilot ‘flew to 40,000ft to suffocate passengers before crashing plane’
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