Sign up to Simon Calder’s free travel email for expert advice and money-saving discounts

Get Simon Calder’s Travel email

A decade on from the MH370 aviation mystery, a British Boeing 777 pilot has claimed that the flight’s take-off documents are clues that the pilot pre-meditated a mass murder-suicide.

Simon Hardy believes that the Malaysian Airlines flight plan and technical log reveal last-minute changes to the cargo including an additional 3,000kg of fuel and extra oxygen that indicate Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah directed the plane “to oblivion”.

Hardy, who worked with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau during the search in 2015, told The Sun: “It’s a strange coincidence that the last engineering task that was done before it headed off to oblivion was topping up crew oxygen which is only for the cockpit, not for the cabin crew.”

The aviation expert called the additions to the flight “bizarre” and said that they didn’t meet the official requirements to justify the changes.

Hardy also said that the flaperon found on Reunion Island indicates there was an active pilot until the end of the flight: “If the flaps were down, there is a liquid fuel, then someone is moving a lever and it’s someone who knows what they are doing. It all points to the same scenario.”

He determined that the pilot had to have “planned meticulously” to time the crash and avoid leaving a trace of fuel residue on the surface of the ocean that would indicate the plane’s final destination.

Like many other theorists, he points to a depressurisation of the cabin by the pilot to knock the 239 passengers unconscious as the pilot made a U-turn to ditch the plane in the ocean.

Combined with a trail of “satellite clues” Hardy believes he has calculated the position of the missing aircraft – just outside the official 7th arc search area – in the Geelvinck Fracture Zone of the Southern Indian Ocean, a trench hundreds of miles long.

The Malaysian Government announced on 3 March that the search could resume for the aircraft that disappeared on 8 March 2014 with Texan company Ocean Infinity on a “no find, no fee” basis.

Read More