A PIECE of debris from the doomed MH370 flight provides a bombshell clue of a criminal plot to sink the plane forever, experts have claimed.
A landing gear door from the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 was found at the home of a Madagascan fisherman 25 days ago – and it’s thought to be the first physical evidence to suggest the jet was crashed deliberately.
Since the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing vanished on March 8, 2014, conflicting theories have surfaced – and the aircraft’s final resting place has never been established.
The plane, with pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah at the helm, disappeared from flight radars and sparked the world’s biggest aviation mystery.
Richard Godfrey, a British engineer, and Blaine Gibson, an American MH370 wreckage hunter, have now suggested the airliner was crashed quickly and deliberately.
The two experts believe damage to the landing gear door – known as a trunnion door – suggests one of the pilots lowered the aircraft’s wheels in the last seconds of the flight, pointing to criminal intent.
Pilots don’t usually lower the landing gear during an emergency landing on water as it increase the chances of the jet violently breaking up into many pieces.
It also increases the chances of the plane sinking quickly – limiting the time for survivors to get out, the experts said.
Godfrey told The Times that the discovery of the landing gear door was “the first item of physical evidence that indicates a possible criminal intent behind the demise of MH370”.
A report published by the pair said: “The combination of the high speed impact designed to break up the aircraft and the extended landing gear designed to sink the aircraft as fast as possible both show a clear intent to hide the evidence of the crash.
“The realistic possibility that the landing gear was lowered shows both an active pilot and an attempt to ensure the plane sank as fast as possible after impact.”
In their bombshell conclusions, Godfrey and Gibson point to damage on the door that they believe was caused by one of the aircraft’s two engines disintegrating on impact – suggesting the wheels were down.
The engines on a Boeing 777 are made up of a fan at the front, a compressor and a turbine at the back.
The researchers suggest the plane’s four-inch damaged compressor blades match the four-inch slashes seen on the door.
“Whatever the cause of the slicing damage, the fact that the damage was from the interior side to the exterior side of the debris item leads to the conclusion that the landing gear was highly likely extended on impact, which in turn supports the conclusion that there was an active pilot until the end of the flight,” they said.
“The level of damage with fractures on all sides and the extreme force of the penetration right through the debris item lead to the conclusion that the end of the flight was in a high-speed dive designed to ensure the aircraft broke up into as many pieces as possible.”
Nineteen of the pieces of MH370 wreckage recovered so far have washed up in Madagascar and been handed in to the authorities.
The door was found at the home of a fisherman, who discovered it washed up on the shore of the Antsiraka Peninsula South Beach in Madagascar in March 2017.
The fisherman admitted he never knew exactly what it was – and his wife even used it as a washing board.
The official script for the Boeing-777’s disappearance suggests the plane executed a dramatic U-turn less than an hour into its planned flight before plummeting into the Indian Ocean.
Several other theories have suggested the plane was hijacked while others have claimed the aircraft was down by the US Air Force or that the plane was in ‘cruising mode’ when it crashed.
It comes after another expert claimed MH370 was downed intentionally in the South Indian Ocean in a spot that has never been searched.
The former French Air Force air traffic controller, Gilles Diharce, spoke exclusively to The Sun Online about evidence that he says proves the disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines Flight was no accident.
However, a study Gilles worked on suggests that the pilot could have been attempting a ‘soft ditching’, a controlled emergency landing, during the flight’s final descent into the ocean.
This goes against official reports that point to a high-speed “death spiral” crash in a spot known as the Seventh Arc.
Gilles worked on a study carried out by aviation experts Patrick Blelly and Jean-Luc Marchand that claims that in his final moments, the pilot could have turned on the plane’s backup power system to regain control of the aircraft when both engines failed due to fuel exhaustion.
It would explain why the plane’s communication system suddenly turned on and tried to connect to the satellite system, Inmarsat.
He said: “Why would a person want to fly the aircraft into the middle of the Indian Ocean?
“It’s possible the person who controlled the aircraft didn’t want anyone to find the plane in the future. To disappear without a trace.”
He also believes this gliding theory means the plane could have crashed in an unsearched area of the South Indian Ocean.
