AN MH370 investigator claims that new data on the doomed plane’s final flight path may prove the pilot deliberately tried to cover his tracks.
Expert Richard Godfrey has revealed all the suspect decisions the pilot allegedly made to hide the passenger plane on that fateful night of March 8, 2014.
This March marked nine-years since the Malaysia Airlines MH370 disappeared with 239 on board after it left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing.
After just 38 minutes, contact was lost with the Boeing 777 close to Phuket Island in the Strait of Malacca – and so began one of the biggest aviation mysteries of all time.
In charge was captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah – although Richard Godfrey does not rule out that co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid or an unknown hijacker may have taken control at some point in the doomed journey.
Speaking exclusively to The Sun, the British aerospace engineer believes that a new 229-page bombshell report could finally hold the evidence to back up his claims.
He has long argued that the pilot flew the jet in circles to prove he wasn’t being followed before committing it to a fast descent and ensuring it was lost forever.
Godfrey, along with researchers Dr Hannes Coetzee, and Professor Simon Maskell believe they have tracked the plane’s six-hour flight path after its final communication to its last location.
“Groundbreaking” amateur radio technology known as a Weak Signal Propagation Reporter, or WSPR, was used to reveal what could be the exact crash site.
However, their report also suggests MH370 committed to a mysterious zig-zag pattern as it neared its alleged final resting place.
Godfrey claims that this appears to be a deliberate attempt to disguise the plane’s location.
He told The Sun Online: “If you fly in a straight line for over 6.5 hours until fuel exhaustion, your final location is easily predictable.”
Instead, “the pilot was making frequent turns [and] was careful to select navigation waypoints, but never to join a flight route, only to cross over a flight route.
His research also claims that Zaharie or another active pilot “intermittently switched” on the Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS).
This would allow him to see other aircraft in the vicinity, but would also immediately give away his own position.
The zig-zagging, Godfrey says, would “make sure that if his position was reported by another aircraft, that they would always report a different track.
“This would naturally confuse Air Traffic Control as to the pilot’s intentions.”
The new data could add weight to claims that pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah crashed the plane on purpose or that a hijacking may have taken place.
However, it is not completely clear whether the strange pattern is simply a quirk in the way WSPR is measured.
“This technology has been developed over the past three years and the results represent credible new evidence,” the researchers stated.
It aligns with Boeing data, Inmarsat satellites and drift analysis to create a “comprehensive picture of the final hours of flight MH370”.
They continued: “Flight MH370 was diverted into the Indian Ocean where it crashed of fuel exhaustion… at some point after the last signal after midnight.
“At the time of writing, MH370 still has not been found despite extensive surface and underwater searches.
“About 10 million commercial passengers fly every day and the safety of the airline industry relies on finding the cause of every accident.”
The suggested new final location of the missing MH370 flight is about 1560km west of Perth, Australia, 4000m deep and slightly north of estimates by other researchers and investigators.
Less than half of the proposed crash site, which spans 130km by 89km, has been searched.
Aviation expert Geoff Thomas told The Today Show on Friday that despite some push-back towards the report, he was hopeful about its findings.
He said: “There is a very high level of confidence. [The report] has been four years in the making, being reviewed over and over again.
“They [the researchers] are certain that they have located where this aircraft is.”
Thomas said the findings are expected to be presented to the Malaysian government and the report has received the families of the passengers backing.
It will also form the basis of a new search by scientists and the ocean company responsible for a 2018 search.
In the past, Godfrey along with fellow investigator Blaine Gibson have analysed the door that housed the plane’s landing gear, one of the few pieces of debris to have been found.
From marks they examined he says the landing gear was extended on impact and “was in a high speed dive designed to ensure the aircraft broke up into as many pieces as possible”.
“The crash of MH370 was anything but a soft landing on the ocean,” he told Australia’s Channel 9 in 2022.
For almost a decade, theories have been running wild as to what exactly happened to MH370 in the hours after the pilot was heard saying: “Good night Malaysian three seven zero”.
