The Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) has released information that a home flight simulator owned by the captain of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, has been examined by the FBI and that he had plotted a route similar to the path the missing airliner is thought to have taken when it vanished on March 8, 2014 with 239 passengers on board. However, the agency stopped short of making any assumption that this proved the pilot had deliberately crashed the plane.
According to the JACC: “The MH370 captain’s flight simulator showed someone had plotted a course to the southern Indian Ocean.
“The simulator information shows only the possibility of planning. It does not reveal what happened on the night of the aircraft’s disappearance, nor where the aircraft is located.” Such a statement was issued as a rebuttal to an article written in the New York magazine and New York journalist Jeff Wise who said that the revelation is “the strongest evidence yet that Zaharie made off with the plane in a premeditated act of mass murder-suicide.”
The Australian Transport Safety Board (ATSB) stated that this “shows only the possibility of planning” and “does not reveal what happened on the night of its disappearance nor where the aircraft is located” in response to claims made by Australian pilot Byron Bailey, made in The Australian this week that the FBI discovery “shows… it was a deliberate planned murder-suicide”.
In an interview with Time magazine, Captain Desmond Ross, an aviation expert with experience as a pilot, felt there had been a “distinct lack of transparency,” though he added that many pilots plot unusual courses on home flight simulators for legitimate reasons.
The search of the 46,000 square mile patch of the southern Indian Ocean – roughly equivalent to the size of Greece – is expected to end in three months. No wreckage has been found in the area, though on two occasions debris believed to have come from the plane’s fuselage has been washed up on the coast of Mozambique and on the shores of Reunion Island.
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