MH370 pilot in control of plane ‘until very end’, French experts suspect

A file photo fromJuly 2015 showing officers carrying a flaperon from MH370 washed ashore in the French territory of La Reunion island. (EPA/AAP). Sketched by the Pan Pacific Agency.

KUALA LUMPUR, Jul 12, 2019, 9News. The pilot of doomed Malaysia Flight MH370 was in control of the passenger jet “until the end”, French experts reportedly believe. The passenger jet disappeared with 239 people aboard – including six Australians – on March 8, 2014 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, reported the 9News.

Many people remain baffled by how the modern Boeing 777 aircraft could simply vanish.

Now analysis of flight data by French investigators support a theory that the pilot crashed the plane into the sea in a murder-suicide, reports Le Parisien.

The revelations based around Boeing data came after a new theory suggested pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah may have been clinically depressed. This may have lead him to turn off the oxygen supply and then crash the plane into the sea.

France is the only country still pursuing a judicial inquiry into the crash.

Two investigating magistrates are looking into the deaths of three French passengers.

On Wednesday, the relatives met the two investigators and told them Boeing had released key flight data to them last year at the company’s US headquarters.

They were obliged to sign a confidentiality agreement by Boeing, meaning the documents cannot be cited in court.

It will take a year for experts to complete their examination of the flight data.

But French air crash experts cited by Le Parisien said the information “lends weight” to the theory that “someone was behind the control stick when the plane broke up in the Indian Ocean”.

It quoted a source linked to the inquiry as saying someone was flying the aircraft “until the very end”.

“Certain abnormal turns made by the 777 can only have been carried out manually. Someone was in control,” the source was cited as saying.

The search for the plane was funded by Malaysia and Australia, the countries contributing hundreds of millions of dollars.

The effort to find the plane was suspended in early 2017, with no answers on the aircraft’s final location or what happened in the plane’s last moments.

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