Aviation experts have claimed they have finally located the crash site of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 which vanished in March 2014 with 239 passengers on board.
Despite a four year, $200million international search effort covering more than 120,000sqm, the plane’s wreckage has never been found, sparking the world’s biggest aviation mystery.
The experts believe MH370 plunged into the South Indian Ocean, near the co-ordinates of S34.2342 and E93.7875, which is about 1,285 miles (2,070km) off the coast of Perth in Western Australia.
A Boeing 777 flaperon cut down to match the one from flight MH370 found on Reunion island off the coast of Africa in 2015, is lowered into water to discover its drift characteristics
Catherine Gang, whose husband Li Zhi was on board the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, holds a banner as she walks outside Yonghegong Lama Temple after a gathering of family members of the missing passengers in Beijing, on March 8, 2015
Engineer Victor Ianello and his team, based in the United States, this week said ‘there are even better odds’ the Boeing 777 is within 100 nautical miles of the of those co-ordinates, according to AirLive.
Mr Ianello, who assisted Australian officials during the search, believes the plane flew 2,700 miles (4,340km) past Indonesia before crashing.
Another aviation expert Byron Bailey, a former pilot, also says investigators were looking in the wrong spot and should have been looking south of the search site.
‘I’m sure the captain was trying to ditch the aircraft in as far south, remote location as possible, and leave as little wreckage as possible that would sink.’ Mr Bailey said.
He claims the search was within 30km of where he estimates the plane wreckage is situated.
‘If I’m wrong then it probably means the aircraft has been taken by aliens or is sitting in a hangar somewhere in Kazakhstan. I’d bet my house on it. As far as I’m concerned we know where it is, we’ve always known where it is,’ he said.
Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah (pictured) was the pilot-in-command when the plane carrying 239 other passengers and crew vanished in March 2014
A graphic showing the flight path of the plane, and where it is thought to have disappeared
Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott in February claimed Malaysia secretly concluded that the pilot at the helm of doomed flight MH370 committed mass murder-suicide.
Mr Abbott sensationally revealed he was told by those at the ‘very top levels’ of the Malaysian government just days after the tragedy that Captain Zaharie Shah was a suicidal killer, rather than their being any fault with the aircraft.
Publicly, the Malaysian government’s investigation remained inconclusive, but privately, Mr Abbott claimed those at the top knew the true explanation within a week of its disappearance, but said search teams were never informed.
‘My very clear understanding, from the very top levels of the Malaysian government is that from very, very early on, they thought it was murder-suicide by the pilot,’ Mr Abbott told a Sky News documentary.
Malaysian investigators publicly gave Captain Shah the all-clear, and were searching areas they believed a ‘ghost plane’ – which continues flying without anyone able to control it – could have reached before running out of fuel and falling back to earth.
The search following the plane’s possible trajectory based upon the understanding the pilots were dead – or somehow incapacitated – before the plane crashed.
Under that scenario, the plane would have continued on its set path, but deliberate action by a pilot to crash the aircraft meant it could have come down far outside the areas that had been searched up to this point.
Mr Abbott called for a new search to be conducted for the plane saying if there were areas not previously search because teams were working under the assumption the pilot did not deliberately down the aircraft.
‘If there is any part of that ocean that could have been reached on that basis that has not yet been explored, let’s get out and explore it,’ he said.
Other ideas that floated at the time included a hijacking attempt, an on-board fire or catastrophic engine failure, but those theories have raised questions as to why a distress signal was never sent.
The prevailing theory is that the plane crash lended six hours after take-off in the South Indian Ocean
