Paris: The pilot of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was in control of the plane "until the end", French investigators suspect, after accessing crucial flight data.

The data lend weight to suspicions that Zaharie Ahmad Shah crashed into the sea in a murder-suicide, they were cited as saying.

A mural for the missing MH370 outside Kuala Lumpur.Credit:AP

The revelations based on Boeing data came weeks after a new account suggested the pilot may have been clinically depressed, leading him to starve the passengers of oxygen, then crash the Boeing 777 into the sea.

Zaharie Ahmad Shah, pilot of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 – the rogue pilot explanation remains the most plausible in the search for the missing plane.Credit:Facebook

MH370 was on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board, when it vanished, becoming one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries.

In July last year investigators released a 495-page report, saying the plane's controls were probably deliberately manipulated to take it off course but they were unable to determine who was responsible.

An area in the southern Indian Ocean where the Australian Maritime Safety Authority concentrated its search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

The only country still conducting a judicial inquiry into the crash is France, where investigating magistrates are looking into the deaths of three French passengers, the wife and two children of Ghyslain Wattrelos, an engineer who met the judges on Wednesday.

According to Le Parisien newspaper, they informed him that Boeing had finally granted them access to vital flight data late in May.

Marie Dose, the plaintiffs' lawyer, said it would take a year to sift through all the data and "nothing permits us to say the pilot was involved".

However, French investigators said the data "lend weight' to the idea that "someone was behind the control stick when the plan broke up in the Indian Ocean". They also cited a source close to the inquiry as saying someone was flying the plane "until the end", adding: "Certain abnormal turns made by the 777 can only have been carried out manually. Someone was in control."

Asked if this meant a deliberate crash, the source said: "It's too early to say categorically but there is nothing to suggest anyone else entered the cockpit."

Wattrelos thanked the judges, who noted the case was "riddled with incoherences" – not least among these would be the role of the flight's inexperienced co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid.

"We know the data initially provided by Malaysian authorities on the plane's altitude were wrong. I hope that by analysing all the data collected at Boeing they will discover a problem that will jump out," Wattrelos said. However, he remains convinced the plane was "taken down".

Last month, friends of Shah, 53, told William Langewiesche, an aviation specialist, that he became obsessed with two young models on the internet after his wife left him, and that he "spent a lot of time pacing empty rooms." Langewiesche said there was a "strong suspicion among investigators" that he was clinically depressed.

Telegraph, London

Source: Read Full Article