MH370 pilot ‘practised flying suicide mission on flight simulator weeks before the airliner disappeared on same route’
News comes just a day after authorities say they're going to call the search off
THE pilot who flew missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 had practised crashing the plane into the Indian Ocean on a simulator just weeks before it disappeared, newly released police documents show.
Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah used an elaborate home-built flight simulator to steer himself over the Strait of Malacca and into the remote southern Indian ocean.
The route he took was chillingly similar to the one the missing plane took the day it vanished from the sky in March 2014.
The finding, which casts a shadow of suspicion over the 53-year-old pilot, was published on Friday by New York magazine, which obtained a confidential document from Malaysian police investigating the incident.
It suggests that the flight's mysterious disappearance might not have been an accident, but a carefully planned suicide operation by the pilot.
The simulator data was gleaned from a computer by the FBI and used by the Malaysian Police during their investigation into the incident.
But the findings were kept from the public when cops released their official report in March.
According to the document, the FBI recovered deleted data points from the flight simulator on Zaharie's hard drive.
"We found a flight path, that lead to the Southern Indian Ocean, among the numerous other flight paths charted on the flight simulator, that could be of interest," the document said.
Although the paths are similar, the simulated flight's endpoint is located some 900 miles from the area where the plane is believed to have gone down.
The Boeing 777 vanished on March 8, 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard. It remains one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history.
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The Malaysian government continues to maintain that it does not know what caused the incident.
At the time Zaharie, an opposition supporter, came under scrutiny amid unsubstantiated reports that he was upset over a jail sentence handed to Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim hours before the plane took off or was suicidal due to personal problems.
His family have always rejected the claims.
News of the simulated flight came the same day that Malaysia, Australia and China, the three nations leading the search, said the hunt will be called off if nothing turns up in the suspected crash zone.
Search teams have investigated almost all of a 120,000 square kilometre-area in which the plane is believed to have crashed.
But with less than 10,000 square kilometres of that zone still to be scoured, devastated families of the 239 missing have been told the effort will be suspended if it is not found within that tiny area.
A letter to relatives said that "with less than 10,000 square kilometres of the high priority search area remaining to be searched, Ministers acknowledged that despite the best efforts of all involved, the likelihood of finding the aircraft is fading."
Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said: "In the absence of new evidence, Malaysia, Australia and China have collectively decided to suspend the search upon completion of the 120,000 square kilometre search area."
Since the crash there have been several theories muted about what caused it to go down including whether one, both or no pilots were in control, whether it was hijacked - or whether all aboard perished and the plane was not controlled at all when it hit the water.
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