A veteran Australian pilot is convinced he knows where Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 crashed into the ocean a decade ago – and his location is not far from where authorities have been searching for the missing plane.
Captain Byron Bailey, who has more than 50 years of experience in the aviation industry, has extensively studied the doomed flight, which disappeared on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board, including six Australians.
Theories put forward by experts in the Sky News documentary MH370: 10 Years On suggest that the Boeing 777’s disappearance was not a tragic accident, but rather a deliberate mass murder-suicide orchestrated by Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah.
During the documentary, which aired on Tuesday evening, Mr Bailey was asked point-blank by presenter Peter Stefanovic: ‘Where is the plane?’
There was no hesitation in his answer: in the Indian Ocean.
“I put it at 39 degrees, eight minutes south, and it’s only about 20 or 25 miles south of where they were looking, and they didn’t want to go that far,” Mr Bailey said.
A map is shown where Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have flown and landed
“That’s where the Australian government planned to search, but when the search actually started, they went the other way.”
Mr Bailey also criticized the major Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) theory about what happened to MH370.
While an initial search was conducted in the South China Sea, efforts focused on the southern Indian Ocean when Australian authorities were asked to take over the mission.
The ATSB conducted an underwater survey in the southern Indian Ocean from May 2014 until the operation was suspended in January 2017.
That’s when the ATSB reached its ghost flight theory, which suggests there was a catastrophic emergency in which hypoxia disabled everyone on board, including the pilot, and the plane flew for hours before crashing.
Hypoxia occurs when the body does not get enough oxygen, which can lead to confusion and a rapid heart rate before the patient loses consciousness.
“Every pilot I know is shaking their head at this fabricated theory of a hypoxic event over the South China Sea, and the plane was swaying on its own for seven hours,” Bailey said.
‘Waste. You have to reprogram the computer.”
He thinks the murder-suicide theory, which states that pilot Captain Shah performed a controlled flight over the plane once it ran out of fuel, is more likely.
Tony Abbott, Prime Minister of Australia when the plane disappeared, said that within about a week it became clear that the passengers and crew had been victims of a murder-suicide plot.
He told the program it was clear to him that “someone had been in charge of that plane” and that the passenger plane’s disappearance was not an accident.
“Airplanes don’t do the same thing as that plane unless someone is behind the wheel,” he said.
Mr Abbott said it quickly became clear that the disappearance was the work of the Malaysian Airlines pilot.
“My very clear understanding from the very highest levels of the Malaysian government is that they thought very early on that it was a murder-suicide by the pilot,” he said.
“I’m not going to say who said what to whom, but let me repeat – I want to be absolutely crystal clear – that it was understood at the highest levels that this was almost certainly a murder-suicide by the pilot, mass murder-suicide. by the pilot.’
In a mix of both major theories, a retired Qantas pilot and RAAF training captain told the documentary that there were several ways someone in the cockpit could take out passengers.
Captain Byron Bailey (pictured), who has more than 50 years of experience in the aviation industry, has extensively studied the doomed flight, which disappeared on March 8, 2014 with 239 people on board, including six Australians.
Mike Glynn said there were several ways someone in the cockpit could take out passengers.
He said someone in the cockpit could have easily locked the door and sent the plane into a confused state by depressurizing the cabin.
“(They would) make sure the door is locked so no one can get in.” Nothing anyone can do,” he said.
“When you open these outflow valves, the pressure in the aircraft is reduced very quickly,” he said.
“If the plane doesn’t descend, you’re going to feel very hypoxic within three to four minutes.”
Mr Glynn added that it would have been easy for someone in the cockpit to keep other people out as lockable doors were introduced after the September 11 plane hijackings.
“The door closes automatically and with this switch you can lock it,” he said.
“There is a manual deadbolt that prohibits any form of access to the cockpit. You can launch a full-scale assault on the door, it won’t change anything.”
Peter Waring’s (photo) expertise in seabed exploration led to his involvement in the search for MH370
An ex-Australian naval officer told the program he believed authorities were looking in the wrong area for MH370 a year after the plane disappeared.
Peter Waring was appointed deputy operations manager of the search in September 2014, but said that in May 2015 he began to have “serious doubts” about the way the investigation was being conducted.
“At several points we made it seem like we had a very good idea of where it was, but that just wasn’t the case,” he said.
“We had absolutely, more or less, almost nothing.
“Over time, the operation became cloaked in a shell of bureaucracy, if you like, and that made it more difficult to change course.”
Mr Waring, a former Navy lieutenant, said that despite indications that the plane may have been in another area, the search operation was unable to change course.
“In some ways we had been locked into this one specific area and had no flexibility to look elsewhere if there were indications that it might be somewhere else,” he said.
Sisters Jeanette Maguire and Eileen Docherty (pictured) had family on board MH370
Catherine Gang, whose husband Li Zhi was on board Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, holds a banner saying the passengers’ families want the truth
Then Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott (right) bids farewell to then Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak after his visit to Perth during the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 at Perth International Airport on April 3, 2014
He said enough of the seabed had been covered by mid-2015 to reject the “leading assumption” that the plane had crashed in the Indian Ocean near an area known as the 7th Arc.
“If that assumption had been correct, we would have found the plane at that point,” he said
The wreckage of MH370 has still not been found almost a decade later, despite its disappearance sparking the largest ever multinational search operation.
The flight from Kuala Lumpur was bound for Beijing and carried passengers from 14 different countries.
Within 40 minutes of what should have been a routine flight, MH370 crossed from Malaysia into Vietnamese airspace.
It was at this point that the passenger plane disappeared from civilian radars and the captain’s now infamous last words were heard.
“Good night, Malaysia 370.”
Jeanette Maguire’s sister and brother-in-law, Cathy and Bob Lawton, were two of the Australians who were on the ill-fated final flight of MH370 a decade ago.
She said the 10th anniversary of the plane’s disappearance was a “major event” because the mystery remains unsolved.
“In some ways it feels just like yesterday. Every year is hard, but for me, 10 years old, it’s realizing how long it will take for me to have no answers,” she said.
Chinese relatives of passengers on the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 participate in a prayer service at the Metro Park Hotel in Beijing, China, in 20
Eileen Docherty, another sister of Cathy Lawton, said the loss “never gets easier.”
But she believes the search was conducted in the best possible way.
‘I am convinced that with the little evidence they had, they did absolutely the best they could. Very grateful,” she said.
Ms Maguire said the family were ‘very well supported’ during the ‘horrendous ordeal’.
She said she can’t blame the pilot, despite many theories suggesting he was guilty.
“I still can’t blame anyone unless I have that proof. It’s just not in my DNA,” she said.
“If you know what we went through, his family will go through the same thing, and on top of that they have to live with guilt.”