I spent a year co-ordinating the MH370 search – we were looking in the wrong area and I think the pilot crashed in a spot that has never been explored

A former naval officer who spent 12 months searching for missing flight MH370 believes it crashed deliberately in an unexplored area deep in the Indian Ocean.

Peter Waring, 41, was drafted into the international search to find the 239 people from flight MH370, six months after it disappeared on March 8, 2014.

The plane is believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean. But several government-sponsored and private searches over nearly a decade have turned up no substantial information.

The official story claims that Zaharie Ahad Shah, the pilot in charge of the ship, made a sudden U-turn less than an hour into the flight, before crashing into the Indian Ocean near an area known as the 7th Arc .

But Waring, an expert in mapping the seabed, believes MH370 crashed deliberately in an area known as the Geelvinck Fracture Zone, almost a thousand miles away from the 7th Arc.

A reconstruction broadcast on National Geographic showed the plane crashing into the sea

He told the Sun that investigators wrongly assumed the plane was out of Shah's control after the last contact with authorities on March 8, 2014.

'I think [the search team] It may have gone wrong with the assumption that the aircraft was ultimately out of control.

“During the search we took this very seriously, that the aircraft may have remained under control in some form after it passed the 7th arc.

“Once that happened, it meant the plane was probably further south.

'…if the plane was still under control at the seventh arc, the extent of the Indian Ocean they could have reached is so unimaginably vast that you could not have afforded to search it all.

“There was a lot of wasted effort looking in the wrong areas.”

He says he believes the theory of Simon Hardy, a Boeing 777 expert, that Shah was “suicidal” and deliberately flew the plane into the Geelvinck Fracture Zone.

Pictured: MH370 Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who piloted the plane alongside First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid

Estimated flight path of MH370, with the island of Sumatra at top right

MH370 inexplicably returned over Malaysia, passing over Thai, South Indian and Indonesian radar

Hardy, who joined the search team in Waring's final months, said he flew into the trench, about half a mile deep and seven miles wide on the seabed, knowing it would be difficult to find.

Hardy believes Shah was in control of the plane when it crashed about 1,500 miles off the west coast of Australia.

Shah, who is missing and presumed dead along with everyone else on the plane, has been charged with planning murder over personal issues.

Some theorize that he locked his co-pilot out of the cockpit, turned off all communications, depressurized the main cabin, and then turned off the plane so it flew on autopilot until it ran out of fuel.

His personal problems, rumored in Kuala Lumpur, included a rift with his wife Fizah Khan, and his anger that a relative, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, had been given a five-year prison sentence for sodomy shortly before he boarded got off the plane. flight to Beijing.

The pair's proposed trajectory for the downing of MH370

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Despite a frantic search by governments and private companies, the plane was never found and the fate of the 237 passengers remains unknown

But the pilot's wife angrily denied any personal problems and other relatives and his friends said he was a devoted family man and loved his job.

Peter said on his podcast, The Search for MH370 – Deepest Dive, that the search team's success was measured by how much of the ocean they scanned, rather than whether the search area was correct.

He said: 'It was clear to me that no matter what new evidence emerged or what new analysis was undertaken, the box [search area] would remain the same.'

Frustrated, he left the project in September 2015 for a new position.

He also criticized the search team's disregard for safety protocols.

“This is perhaps the roughest area of ​​the ocean in terms of sea state in the world, ships move so slowly you could walk faster,” the former naval officer said.

“Not only was the ship moving very slowly, which you don't do in bad weather, but they were towing this thing[search equipment] behind them it was two miles deep in the water.

“It's really dangerous, we were very lucky that no one was injured or killed, and it irritated me that we were so flippant with their statements.” [crew’s] safety.'

Waring added that the search had been rushed and improperly conducted given the enormous pressure on the Malaysian government to find the plane as quickly as possible.

'There was a lot of political pressure to achieve milestones. Part of my job was to report each day how much of the search area had been covered the day before.

“The measure of success was only how much of that box we completed, not whether the box was in the right place to begin with.”