INQUISITR.COM / News & Politics

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Searchers Admit Plane May Be Somewhere Else, Deliberately Glided Into Sea

By Jonathan Vankin
Published on: 03:26 PST, Jul 22, 2016

As officials in charge of the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 say they are on the verge of suspending the hunt for the vanished 777-200, possibly forever, top members of the Dutch company actually carrying out the search now admit in a Reuters report that the missing airliner may not be in the designated search area after all.

In fact, they say, the plane that disappeared on March 8, 2014, along with 239 passengers and crew members, may have actually glided to its final resting place rather than simply running out of fuel and spiraling into the ocean in a violent crash.

If indeed the Flight MH370 aircraft (pictured above, on an earlier flight), with serial number 9M-MRO, glided down into the Indian Ocean, then a conscious pilot had to be at the controls, the officials say.

“If it’s not there, it means it’s somewhere else,” Paul Kennedy, the project director for Dutch search firm Furgo, told Reuters.

“If it was manned it could glide for a long way. You could glide it for further than our search area is, so I believe the logical conclusion will be well maybe that is the other scenario.”

The Inquisitr has reported in several earlier articles on the possibility that the Malaysia Airlines plane lies somewhere outside the current search area — most likely far to the north in the Indian Ocean — based on the findings of independent researchers who have studied ocean drift patterns. To access the earlier Inquisitr stories, see the “Previous Coverage” box below on this page.

Because the plane’s black box flight recorders have never been found, what actually happened on board Flight MH370, as well as what transpired in the flight’s final, fateful moments, remain a total mystery.

The following video released July 22 by the French Press Agency covers both the background and latest developments in the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappearance.

Because five confirmed — or highly likely — pieces of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 debris have been discovered washed up on beaches in the area of southeastern Africa, and several more suspected debris shards have turned up in the same area as well, statisticians and oceanic experts have been able to trace the drift patterns back to an area most likely nearer to Indonesia in the northern Indian Ocean, rather than the southern strip of water where the search has focused exclusively.

The Australian-led official search team has maintained that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 was most likely a “ghost plane,” flying on automatic pilot for seven hours after the crew and passengers had been incapacitated or killed by some sort of catastrophic event on board.

With no one at the controls, they maintain that the plane would have flown until it ran out of fuel, at which point the Malaysia Airlines 777 would have plunged toward the ocean in a death spiral, crashing violently into an area of the Indian Ocean about 1,200 west of Perth, Australia, now known as the Seventh Arc.

The possibility that a pilot consciously flew the plane, which had been en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, seven hours and thousands of miles off course and deliberately guided it down into the sea with 239 people on board raises a far more chilling scenario even than that of an out-of-control “ghost plane” and only deepens the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 mystery by adding the question, “why?”

PREVIOUS MALAYSIA AIRLINES FLIGHT MH370 COVERAGE FROM THE INQUISITR

At a reported cost of US$135 million, the official search team has covered all but 3,900 square miles in the 46,000 square-mile search area — an area roughly the size of the state of Mississippi. Officials now say that once those 3,900 square miles are accounted for, the search will be “put on hold” indefinitely, according to a National Public Radio report.

Malaysia’s Transport Mininster, Liow Tiong Lai, said that the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 could resume at some future point if new evidence that authorities deemed credible were to surface, indicating that a renewed search could yield results.

[Image via Jordan Vuong | Wikimedia | Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License]

Share this article: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Searchers Admit Plane May Be Somewhere Else, Deliberately Glided Into Sea
More from Inquisitr