Malaysia Airlines, in a rare public statement about the disappearance of Flight MH370, fired back Wednesday at the authors of a new book that blames the missing plane’s pilot for deliberately downing the plane in a bizarre murder-suicide plot.
The book, Goodnight Malaysian 370 , written by former chief executive of New Zealand’s Kiwi International Airlines Ewan Wilson and journalist Geoff Taylor, is named after the final words transmitted by the missing Flight MH370 pilot to ground controllers before the Boeing 777-200 vanished.
As reported last month by The Inquisitr , in advance of the book’s release, the authors claim that pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah deliberately shut off the supply of pressurized air to the cabin , leaving the 238 other passengers and crew just 20 minutes to live. Shah also allegedly locked his co-pilot out of the cockpit as he murdered the passengers, the authors claim.
Shah then set Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 — a flight bound for Beijing, China — on an course to nowhere in the direction of the Indian Ocean, where he then set the plane down in the water and let it sink to the bottom in one piece, according to Wilson and Taylor’s allegations.
Though the authors say that they considered every other possibility, arriving at their theory about Shah — whom they characterize as suffering from some sort of mental illness — essentially by process of elimination, Malaysia Airlines flatly denied that the book’s allegations have any substance.
In an unusual move by Malaysia Airlines which has remained largely silent as the search for the missing plane has dragged on for more more than six months, the airline accused the two authors of cooking up their macabre theory simply to make a buck.
“There is no evidence to support any of the claims made in the book, which is a product of pure conjecture for the purposes of profit by the authors and publishers,” Malaysia Airlines said in the statement.
But the airline didn’t stop there, castigating the New Zealand authors as “self described ‘experts’ offering an analysis beyond their knowledge and abilities,” the beleaguered airline stated .
“The authors and publishers should quite simply be ashamed of themselves for what is nothing more than a cheap and maligned publicity stunt, seeking to simply cash in on the suffering of the families and undermining the dignity of all of those on-board,” said the Malaysia Airlines statement.
Danica Weeks, the wife of missing passenger Paul Weeks, while not endorsing the book’s conclusions about Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, credited the authors for contacting her before finishing their book.