Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah is the man responsible for the plane’s baffling disappearance , brilliantly executing a sinister plot to prove his superior aviation skills by ensuring that the Boeing 777-200 would never be found. Those are the conclusions of Ewan Wilson, an aviator, accident investigator and founder of Kiwi Airlines, who conducted an independent, four-month study of the Malaysia Airlines mystery.
“Ahmad Shah was a man known for his methodical, thorough nature, for his love of the technical, and probably for his ego, too,” said Wilson, whose findings are detailed in his new book, Goodnight Malaysian 370: The Truth Behind The Loss Of Flight 370 . “This would have been his final sad act to his family and to the world: ‘find this one.’”
Wilson says he and co-author Geoff Taylor investigated “every conceivable alternative scenario” before arriving at the shocking conclusions in the book, in which he argues that Shah locked his co-pilot out of the cockpit then deliberately murdered all 239 people on board by depressurizing the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 cabin, which would have deprived everyone on board of oxygen.
While oxygen masks would have automatically dropped, Wilson acknowledges, he says that with many of the passengers asleep they may not have been aware of the masks, which provide only about 20 minutes worth of oxygen anyway.
But Shah, described by Wilson as mentally ill, put his twisted plan into effect a full four hours before finally crashing the Malaysia Airlines plane in the Indian Ocean, the independent New Zealand investigator says.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished from radar and ground contact during an otherwise routine March 8 flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China. But despite a multimillion dollar search involving numerous countries, not a single trace of the plane or scrap of debris has turned up.
Wilson says he has a solution to that mystery as well. After killing everyone on board, Shah either re-pressurized the cabin or survived on is own, more plentiful oxygen supply for the final four hours.
At that time, Wilson says, Shah landed the plane on the surface of the Indian Ocean in what Wilson calls a “controlled ditching,” similar to that executed by US Airways pilot Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger on the surface of the Hudson River in New York in 2009. But instead of attempting to save the Malaysia Airlines plane, Shah simply allowed the Boeing 777 to sink to the bottom of the ocean in one piece — leaving no debris or evidence, Wilson says.
“We could never have foreseen the information we uncovered, or their implications,” Wilson says. “Neither could we have imagined the horrific scenario that our research suggests took place on board that fateful plane.”
Shah was named in June media reports as the “prime suspect” in the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, but Malaysian authorities dismissed those reports.