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- Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is now six days shy of being missing for almost eight years.
- Top air crash investigators now believe the plane didn’t just disappear by accident.
- Read more news about missing Flight MH370 here.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished off the face of the Earth on March 8, 2014 with 239 people on board. Not a single one of them has ever been found.
It certainly hasn’t been for lack of trying. Numerous experts and investigators have taken a crack at trying to solve perhaps the biggest mystery in the history of aviation.
Now, even more top air crash investigators have put forth new theories about what happened to Flight MH370 and they feel pretty confident about them.
During his appearance on the recent Sky News Australia documentary MH370: The Final Search, former pilot and top aviation safety investigator John Cox says he believes Flight MH370 was deliberately sabotaged.
Related: New Report Claims To Have Pinpointed The Location Of Missing Flight MH370
It has been widely speculated that the pilot of Flight MH370, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, either deliberately crashed the passenger jet or was the victim of a hijacking. One aviation expert who has been studying the disappearance even put forth theories about how Russia would have had the means and motive to hijack the flight.
Another popular theory about Flight MH370’s disappearace believes that Shah depressurized the plane, causing the passengers to suffer hypoxia, then lowered the plane to 3,000 feet and then parachuted out to meet his mistress in a boat, leaving the plane to crash somewhere in the ocean.
While another theory believes Captain Shah was depressed leading up to the flight and deliberately crashed the plane into the Indian Ocean in some sort of suicide mission.
According to Cox, we can rule out several of those hypotheses, including any that involved a hijacking.
“I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming that the airplane could not have flown the route it did with all the respective turns without that being a commandeered maneuver,” he told Sky News Australia.
Cox also pointed out that Shah would have been the only person on the flight who would have had the knowledge and experience necessary to disable Flight MH370’s datalink system.
The plane disappeared off air traffic control’s radar around 40 minutes after takeoff.
Was the pilot of MH370 ultimately the one responsible for its disappearance?
Canadian aviation crash investigator Larry Vance also told Sky News Australia that believes Flight MH370’s disappearance was a deliberate act.
“MH370 was a criminal act, the aircraft was intentionally ditched, exactly as I described in my book, of this I have no doubt,” said Nance.
Related: New Technology May Have Revealed Fresh Clues About Where Flight MH370 Went After It Disappeared
Aviation writer and former commercial pilot Mike Glynn said he thinks a 22 minute holding pattern discovered in MH370’s flight path may hold the key.
“There’s no reason to do that,” he said. “My theory has always been that it was the captain who is responsible.”
Danica Weeks, whose husband was on board Flight MH370, told Sky News Australia after learning about the 22 minute holding pattern, “What were they doing in that 22 minutes …? Was there negotiations with the pilot? We should be told about it … we should know what happened for 22 minutes … Was there an on-board fight with the pilots and the passengers … was it another September 11 … but 22 minutes is a long time to be going around in circles. He [Captain Shah] must’ve been talking to someone … it’s just a complete cover up.”
Glynn also offered up yet another new theory that ties Captain Shah to the plane’s disappearance. He says he thinks it may have something to do with Shah being angry over the arrest of his relative, Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, was convicted of sodomy just one day before Flight MH370’s disappearance.
Whether any of these theories, as had been the case for almost eight years now, are true remains to be seen.